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THE CAMERA FIEND 






A yellow poster bearing four words. 








THE 

CAMERA FIEND 


V t ^>Y 

E. W. HORNUNG 


ILLUSTRATED 


CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS 
NEW YORK ::::::::::::: 1911 













Copyright, 1911 by 
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS 


Published March, 1911 





©GI.A283498 




CONTENTS 


Chapter 

I. 

A Conscientious Ass 

Page 

3 

II. 

A Boy About Town 

18 

III. 

His People .... 

36 

IV. 

A Grim Samaritan 

47 

V. 

The Glass Eye 

. . 60 

VI. 

An Awakening 

74 

VII. 

Blood-Guilty 

. . 84 

VIII. 

Points of View 

. . IOI 

IX. 

Mr. Eugene Thrush 

. . 116 

X. 

Second Thoughts . 

. . 138 

XI. 

On Parole .... 

. 151 

XII. 

Hunting with the Hounds . 

. 165 


V 






Contents 


Chapter 

XIII. 

Boy and Girl * 

• 

Page 

. l82 

XIV. 

Before the Storm • 

• 

. I98 

XV. 

A Likely Story 


. 208 

XVI. 

Malingering 


. 226 

XVII. 

On the Track of the Truth 


• 243 

XVIII. 

A Third Case 


. 262 

XIX. 

The Fourth Case 


. 278 

XX. 

What the Thames Gave Up 


. 29I 

XXI. 

After the Fair 


• 3°4 

XXII. 

The Secret of the Camera . 


• 3 i 5 




ILLUSTRATIONS 


A yellow poster bearing four words . 

He tugged to free his imprisoned wrist 
The plate was rocked as in raspberry-juice 
He offered it in the best romantic manner . 
The lamp flew through the open window . 

“ I popped the camera under my waterproof ” 


. Frontispiece 

Facing 

Page 

5 °^ 
7 2 vX 

. . 244 >—^ 

. . 280 

3 l6 ^ 


c 


THE CAMERA FIEND 









* 










0 




* 






The Camera Fiend 


CHAPTER I 

A Conscientious Ass 

P OCKET UPTON had come down late and 
panting, in spite of his daily exemption from 
first school, and the post-card on his plate had 
taken away his remaining modicum of breath. 
He could have wept over it in open hall, and 
would probably have done so in the subsequent 
seclusion of his own study, had not an obvious 
way out of his difficulty been bothering him by 
that time almost as much as the difficulty itself. 
For it was not a very honest way, and the un¬ 
fortunate Pocket had been tailed “a conscien¬ 
tious ass” by some of the nicest fellows in his 
house. Perhaps he deserved the epithet for go¬ 
ing even as straight as he did to his housemaster, 
who was discovered correcting proses with a blue 
pencil and a brier pipe. 

3 



The Camera Fiend 


“ Please, sir, Mr. Coverley can’t have me, sir. 
He’s got a case of chicken-pox, sir.” 

The boy produced the actual intimation in a 
few strokes of an honored but laconic pen. The 
man poised his pencil and puffed his pipe. 

“ Then you must come back to-night, and I’m just 
as glad. It’s all nonsense your staying the night 
whenever you go up to see that doctor of yours.” 

“He makes a great point of it, sir. He likes to 
try some fresh stuff on me, and then see what sort 
of night I have.” 

“You could go up again to-morrow.” 

“Of course I could, sir,” replied Pocket Upton, 
with a delicate emphasis on his penultimate. At 
the moment he was perhaps neither so acutely 
conscientious nor such an ass as his critics con¬ 
sidered him. 

“What else do you propose?” inquired Mr. 
Spearman. 

“Well, sir, I have plenty of other friends in 
town, sir. Either the Knaggses or Miss Harbottle 
would put me up in a minute, sir.” 

“Who are the Knaggses?” 

“The boys were with me at Mr. Coverley’s, 
sir; they go to Westminster now. One of them 
stayed with us last holidays. They live in St. 
John’s Wood Park. 


4 


A Conscientious Ass 

“And the lady you mentioned ?” 

“Miss Harbottle, sir, an old friend of my 
mother’s; it was through her I went to Mr. 
Coverley’s, and I’ve often stayed there. She’s 
in the Wellington Road, sir, quite close to 
Lord’s.” 

Mr. Spearman smiled at the gratuitous explana¬ 
tion of an eagerness that other lads might have 
taken more trouble to conceal. But there was no 
guile in any Upton; in that one respect the third 
and last of them resembled the great twin breth¬ 
ren of whom he had been prematurely voted a 
“pocket edition” on his arrival in the school. He 
had few of their other merits, though he took a 
morbid interest in the games they played by light 
of nature, as well as in things both beyond and 
beneath his brothers and the average boy. You 
cannot sit up half your nights with asthma and be 
an average boy. This was obvious even to Mr. 
Spearman, who was an average man. He had 
never disguised his own disappointment in the 
youngest Upton, but had often made him the butt 
of outspoken and disastrous comparisons. Yet in 
his softer moments he had some sympathy with 
the failure of an otherwise worthy family; this 
fine June morning he seemed even to understand 
the joy of a jaunt to London for a boy who was 

5 


The Camera Fiend 

getting very little out of his school life. He made 
a note of the two names and addresses. 

“ You’re quite sure they’ll put you up, are 
you ?” 

“Absolutely certain, sir.” 

“But you’ll come straight back if they can’t?” 

“Rather, sir!” 

“Then run away, and don’t miss your train.” 

Pocket interpreted the first part of the injunc¬ 
tion so literally as to arrive very breathless in his 
study. That diminutive cell was garnished with 
more ambitious pictures than the generality of its 
order; but the best of them was framed in the ivy 
round the lattice window, and its foreground was 
the nasturtiums in the flower box. Pocket glanced 
down into the quad, where the fellows were pre¬ 
paring construes for second school in sunlit groups 
on garden seats. At that moment the bell began. 
And by the time Pocket had changed his black tie 
for a green one with red spots, in which he had 
come back after the Easter holidays, the bell had 
stopped and the quad was empty; before it filled 
again he would be up in town and on his way to 
Welbeck Street in a hansom. 

The very journey was a joy. It was such sport 
to be flying through a world of buttercups and 
daisies in a train again, so refreshing to feel as 
6 


A Conscientious Ass 

good as anybody else in the third smoker; for even 
the grown men in the corner seats did not dream 
of calling the youth an “old ass,” much less a 
young one, to his face. His friends and contem¬ 
poraries at school were in the habit of employing 
the ameliorating adjective, but there were still a 
few fellows in Pocket’s house who made an in¬ 
sulting point of the other. All, however, seemed 
agreed as to the noun; and it was pleasant to cast 
off friend and foe for a change, to sit comfortably 
unknown and unsuspected of one’s foibles in the 
train. It made Pocket feel a bit of a man; but 
then he really was almost seventeen, and in the 
Middle Fifth, and allowed to smoke asthma cig¬ 
arettes in bed. He took one out of a card-board 
box in his bag, and thought it might do him good 
to smoke it now. But an adult tobacco smoker 
looked so curiously at the little thin cross between 
cigar and cigarette, that it was transferred to a 
pocket unlit, and the coward hid himself behind 
his paper, in which there were several items of im¬ 
mediate interest to him. Would the match hold 
out at Lord’s ? If not, which was the best of 
the Wednesday matinees? Pocket had received a 
pound from home for his expenses, so that these 
questions took an adventitious precedence over 
even such attractive topics as an execution and a 
7 


The Camera Fiend 

murder that bade fair to lead to one. But the 
horrors had their turn, and having supped on 
the newspaper supply, he continued the feast in 
Henry Dunbar , the novel he had brought with him 
in his bag. There was something like a murder! 
It was so exciting as to detach Pocket Upton from 
the flying buttercups and daisies, from the reek of 
the smoking-carriage, the real crimes in the paper, 
and all thoughts of London until he found himself 
there too soon. 

The asthma specialist was one of those enter¬ 
prising practitioners whose professional standing 
is never quite on a par with their material success. 
The injurious discrepancy may have spoilt his 
temper, or it may be that his temper was at the 
root of the prejudice against him. He was never 
very amiable with Pocket Upton, a casual patient 
in every sense; but this morning Dr. Bompas had 
some call to complain. 

“You mean to tell me,” he expostulated, “that 
you’ve gone back to the cigarettes in spite of what 
I said last time ? If you weren’t a stupid school¬ 
boy I should throw up your case!” 

Pocket did not wish to have his case thrown up; 
it would mean no more days and nights in town. 
So he accepted his rebuke without visible resent¬ 
ment. 


8 


A Conscientious Ass 

“It’s the only way I can stop an attack,” he 
mumbled. 

“Nonsense!” snapped the specialist. “You can 
make yourself coffee in the night, as you’ve done 
before.” 

“I can’t at school. They draw the line at 
that.” 

“Then a public school is no place for you. 
I’ve said so from the first. Your people should 
have listened to me, and sent you on a long sea 
voyage under the man I recommended, in the 
ship I told them about. She sails the day after to¬ 
morrow, and you should have sailed in her.” 

The patient made no remark; but he felt as 
sore as his physician on the subject of that long sea 
voyage. It would have meant a premature end 
to his undistinguished school-days, and good- 
by to all thought of following in his brothers’ 
steps on the field of school-boy glory. But he 
might have had adventures beyond the pale of 
that circumscribed arena, he might have been 
shipwrecked on a desert island, and lived to tell 
a tale beyond the dreams of envious athletes, 
if his people had but taken kindly to the scheme. 
But they had been so very far from taking to it 
at all, with the single exception of his only sister, 
that the boy had not the heart to discuss it now. 

9 


( 


The Camera Fiend 

“If only there were some medicine one could 
take to stop an attack!” he sighed. “But there 
doesn’t seem to be any.” 

“There are plenty of preventives,” returned the 
doctor. “That’s what we want. Smoking and 
inhaling all sorts of rubbish is merely a palliative 
that does more harm than good in the long 
run.” 

“But it does you good when the preventives 
fail. If I could get a good night without smok¬ 
ing I should be thankful.” 

“If I promise you a good night will you give 
me your cigarettes to keep until to-morrow?” 

“If you like.” 

The doctor wrote a prescription while the boy 
produced the card-board box from his bag. 

“Thank you,” said Bompas, as they made an 
exchange. “I don’t want you even to be tempted 
to smoke to-night, because I know what the temp¬ 
tation must be when you can’t get your breath. 
You will get this prescription made up in two 
bottles; take the first before you go to bed to¬ 
night, and the second if you wake with an attack 
before five in the morning. You say you are stay¬ 
ing the night with friends; better give me the name 
and let me see if they’re on the telephone before 
you go. I want you to go to bed early, tell them 
io 


A Conscientious Ass 


not to call you in the morning, and come back to 
me the moment you've had your breakfast." 

They parted amicably after all, and Pocket 
went off only wondering whether he ought to 
have said positively that he was staying with 
friends when he might be going back to school. 
But Dr. Bompas had been so short with him at 
first as to discourage unnecessary explanations; 
besides, there could be no question of his going 
back that night. And the difficulty of the morning, 
which he had quite forgotten in the train, was not 
allowed to mar a moment of his day in town. 

The time-table of that boy's day must speak for 
itself. It was already one o'clock, and he was nat¬ 
urally hungry, especially after the way his breakfast 
had been spoilt by Coverley's card. At 1.15 he 
was munching a sausage roll and sipping chocolate 
at a pastry-cook's in Oxford Street. The sausage 
roll, like the cup of chocolate, was soon followed by 
another, and a big Bath bun completed a debauch 
of which Dr. Bompas would undoubtedly have 
disapproved. 

At 1.45, from the top of an Atlas omnibus in 
Baker Street, he espied a placard with “ Collapse 
of Middlesex" in appalling capitals. And at the 
station he got down to learn the worst before 
going on to Lord's for nothing. 

11 


The Camera Fiend 

The worst was so hopelessly bad that Pocket 
wished himself nearer the theatres, and then it was 
that the terra-cotta pile of Madame Tussaud’s 
thrust itself seductively upon his vision. He had 
not been there for years. He had often wanted 
to go again, and go alone. He remembered being 
taken by his sister when a little boy at Coverley’s, 
but she had refused to go into the Chamber of 
Horrors, and he had been relieved at the time but 
sorry ever afterwards, because so many of the boys 
of those days had seen everything and seemed none 
the worse for the adventure. It was one of the 
things he had always wanted not so much to do as 
to have done. The very name of the Chamber of 
Horrors had frozen his infant blood when he first 
heard it on the lips of a criminological governess. 
On the brink of seventeen there was something of 
the budding criminologist about Pocket Upton 
himself; had not a real murder and Henry Dunbar 
formed his staple reading in the train ? And yet 
the boy had other sensibilities which made him 
hesitate outside the building, and enter eventually 
with quite a flutter under the waistcoat. 

A band in fantastic livery was playing away 
in the marble hall; but Pocket had no ear for 
their music, though he was fond enough of a 
band. And though history was one of his few 
12 


A Conscientious Ass 

strong points at school, the glittering galaxy 
of kings and queens appealed to him no more 
than the great writers at their little desks and 
the great cricketers in their unconvincing flannels. 
They were waxworks one and all. But when 
the extra sixpence had been paid at the inner 
turnstile, and he had passed down a dungeon 
stair into the dim vaults below, his imagination 
was at work upon the dreadful faces in the docks 
before he had brought his catalogue to bear on 
one of them. 

Here were wretches whose vile deeds had long 
been familiar to the school-boy through a work on 
his father’s shelves called Annals of Our Time. 
He recalled bad nights when certain of those annals 
had kept him awake long after his attack; and here 
were the actual monsters, not scowling and fero¬ 
cious as he had always pictured them, but far more 
horribly demure and plump. Here were immortal 
malefactors like the Mannings; here were Rush 
and Greenacre cheek by jowl, looking as though 
they had stepped out of Dickens in their obsolete 
raiment, looking anything but what they had been. 
Some wore the very clothes their quick bodies had 
filled; here and there were authentic tools of death, 
rusty pistols, phials of poison with the seals still 
bright, and a smug face smirking over all in self- 
13 


The Camera Fiend 

conscious infamy. There was not enough of the 
waxwork about these creatures; in the poor light, 
and their own clothes, and the veritable dock in 
which many of them had heard their doom, they 
looked hideously human and alive. One, a little 
old man, sat not in the dock but on the drop itself, 
the noose dangling in front of him; and the school¬ 
boy felt sorry for him, for his silver bristles, for 
the broad arrows on his poor legs, until he found 
out who it was. Then he shuddered. It was 
Charles Peace. He had first heard of Charles 
Peace from the nice governess aforesaid; and here 
under his nose were the old ruffian’s revolver, and 
the strap that strapped it to his wrist, with the 
very spectacles he had wiped and worn. 

The hobbledehoy was almost as timorously en¬ 
tranced as he had been in infancy by untimely tales 
of crime. He stood gloating over the grewsome 
relics, over ropes which had hanged men whose 
trials he had read for himself in later days, and 
yet wondering with it all whether he would ever 
get these things out of his mind again. They 
filled it to overflowing. He might have had the 
horrid place to himself. Yet he had entered it 
with much amusement at the heels of a whole 
family in deep mourning, a bereaved family drown¬ 
ing their sorrow in a sea of gore, their pilot through 
x 4 


A Conscientious Ass 

the catalogue a conscientious orphan with a mo¬ 
notonous voice and a genius for mispronunciation. 
Pocket had soon ceased to see or hear him or any 
other being not made of wax. And it was only 
when he was trying to place a nice-looking mur¬ 
derer in a straw hat, who suddenly moved into a 
real sight-seer like himself, that the unwholesome 
spell was broken. 

Pocket was not sorry to be back in the adulter¬ 
ated sunshine and the comparatively fresh air of 
the Marylebone Road. He was ashamed to find 
that it was after four o’clock. Guy and Vivian 
Knaggs would be home from Westminster in 
another hour. Still it was no use getting there 
before them, and he might as well walk as not; 
it was pleasant to rub shoulders with flesh and 
blood once more, and to look in faces not made 
of wax in the devil’s image. His way, which 
he knew of old, would naturally have led him 
past Miss Harbottle’s door; but, as she was only 
to be his second string for the night, he preferred 
not to be seen by that old lady yet. Such was 
the tiny spring of an important action; it led the 
wanderer into Circus Road and a quite unfore¬ 
seen temptation. 

In the Circus Road there happens to be a 
highly respectable pawnbroker’s shop; in the 

15 


The Camera Fiend 


pawnbroker’s window the chances are that you 
might still find a motley collection of umbrellas, 
mandolins, family Bibles, ornaments and clocks, 
strings of watches, trays of purses, opera-glasses, 
biscuit boxes, photograph frames and cheap jew¬ 
elry, all of which could not tempt you less than 
they did Pocket Upton the other June. There 
were only two things in the window that inter¬ 
ested him at all, and they were not both temp¬ 
tations. One was an old rosewood camera, and 
Pocket was interested in cameras old and new; but 
the thing that tempted him was a little revolver 
at five-and-six, with what looked like a box of 
cartridges beside it, apparently thrown in for 
the price. 

A revolver to take back to school! A revolver 
to fire in picked places on the slow walks with 
a slow companion which were all the exercise 
this unfortunate fellow could take! A revolver 
and cartridges complete, so that one could try it 
now, in no time, with Guy and Vivian at the end 
of their garden in St. John’s Wood Park! And 
all very likely for five bob if one bargained a bit! 

Pocket took out his purse and saw what a 
hole the expenditure of any such sum would 
make. But what was that if it filled a gap in 
his life ? Of course it would have been breaking 
16 


A Conscientious Ass 


a school rule, but he was prepared to take the 
consequences if found out; it need not involve 
his notion of dishonor. Still, it must be recorded 
that the young or old ass was conscientious enough 
to hesitate before making his fatal plunge into 
the pawnbroker’s shop. 


17 


CHAPTER II 

A Boy About Town 


HE young Westminsters had not come in 



1 when Pocket finally cast up in St. John’s 
Wood Park. But their mother was at home, 
and she gave the boy a cup of tepid tea out of a 
silver teapot in the drawing-room. Mrs. Knaggs 
was a large lady who spoke her mind with much 
freedom, at all events to the young. She re¬ 
marked how much Upton (so she addressed him) 
had altered; but her tone left Pocket in doubt 
as to whether any improvement was implied. 
She for one did not approve of his luncheon in 
Oxford Street, much less of the way he had spent 
a summer’s afternoon; indeed, she rather wondered 
at his being allowed alone in London at all. 
Pocket, who could sometimes shine in conver¬ 
sation with his elders, at once reminded Mrs. 
Knaggs that her own Westminster boys were 
allowed alone in London every day of their lives. 
But Mrs. Knaggs said that was a very different 


A Boy About Town 

thing, and that she thought Pocket’s public 
school must be very different from Westminster. 
Pocket bridled, but behaved himself; he knew 
where he wanted to stay the night, and got as 
far toward inviting himself as to enlarge upon 
Mr. Coverley’s misfortune and his own disap¬ 
pointment. Mrs. Knaggs in her turn did ask 
him where he meant to stay, and even the con¬ 
scientious Pocket caught himself declaring he 
had no idea. Then the boys were heard re¬ 
turning, and Mrs. Knaggs said of course he 
would stop to school-room supper, and Pocket 
thanked her as properly as though it were the 
invitation he made sure must follow. After all, 
Vivian Knaggs had stayed at Pocket’s three weeks 
one Christmas, and Guy a fortnight at Easter; the 
boys themselves would think of that; it was not 
a matter to broach to them, or one to worry 
about, prematurely. 

Vivian and Guy were respectively rather older 
and rather younger than Pocket, and they came 
in looking very spruce, the one in his Eton jacket, 
the other in tails, but both in shining toppers that 
excited an unworthy prejudice in the wearer of 
the green tie with red spots. They seemed very 
glad to see him, however, and the stiffness was 
wearing off even before Pocket produced his 
19 


The Camera Fiend 

revolver in the basement room where the two 
Westminsters prepared their lessons and had their 
evening meal. 

The revolver melted the last particle of ice, 
though Vivian Knaggs pronounced it an old pin- 
firer, and Guy said he would not fire it for a 
thousand pounds. This only made Pocket the 
more eager to show what he and his revolver 
were made of, then and there in the garden, and 
the more confident that it never would be heard 
in the house. 

“It would,” answered Vivian, “and seen as 
well. No, if you want to have a shot let’s stick 
up a target outside this window, and fire from 
just inside.” 

The window was a French one leading into 
the back garden; but, unhappily, Mrs. Knaggs’s 
bedroom was only two floors higher, and it also 
looked out on the back; and Mrs. Knaggs her¬ 
self was in her room and near her window when 
the report startled her, and not less because she 
little dreamt what it was until she looked out in 
time to see a cloud of smoke escaping from the 
school-room window, and Pocket examining the 
target, weapon in hand. 

There was a great scene about it. Mrs. Knaggs 
shrieked a prohibition from aloft, and having paci- 
20 


A Boy About Town 

bed an incoherent cook upon the stairs, descended 
to extract a solemn promise which might well 
have ended the matter. Pocket was very contrite 
indeed, drew his weapon’s teeth with a prompti¬ 
tude that might have been his death, and offered 
it and them to be placed under lock and key un¬ 
til he left. But Mrs. Knaggs contented herself 
with promoting a solemn promise into a Sacred 
Word of Honor—which rather hurt poor Pocket— 
and with sending him a very straight message by 
Vivian after supper. 

“The mater’s awfully sorry,” said Vivian, re¬ 
turning from a mission which Pocket had been 
obliged to instigate after all. “There’s not a 
spare bed in the house.” 

Guy incontinently declared there was. A fra¬ 
ternal frown alone prevented him from going into 
particulars. 

“A sofa would do me all right,” suggested 
Pocket, who had long ago lost his last train, and 
would have preferred a bare plank where there 
were boys to fussy old Miss Harbottle’s best bed. 
But Vivian Knaggs shook his head. 

“The mater says she couldn’t sleep with fire¬ 
arms in the house.” 

“I’ll bury them in the garden if she likes.” 

“Then you smoke in the night, and at Coverley’s 
21 


The Camera Fiend 

you once walked in your sleep,” pursued Vivian, 
who certainly seemed to have been urging the 
interloper’s cause. “And the mater’s afraid you 
might walk out of a window or set the house on 
fire.” 

“I shouldn’t do either to-night,” protested 
Pocket, with a grin. “I’ve not got anything to 
smoke, and I have got something to keep me 
quiet.” 

And with further information on both points 
the son of the house went upstairs again, only to 
return in quicker time with a more embarrassed 
gravity. 

“She’s awfully sorry,” he said unconvincingly, 
“but she can’t undertake the responsibility of 
putting you up with your asthma.” 

Oddly enough, for he was only too sensitive 
on some points, Pocket was not really hurt by 
his treatment at the hands of these people; he 
felt he had made rather a mistake, but not that 
he had been most inhumanly cast adrift at six¬ 
teen among the shoals and quicksands of London. 
Nor was this quite the case as yet; there was 
still old Miss Harbottle in Wellington Road. But 
to her he was not going until decency compelled 
him; he was going to have another game of bag¬ 
atelle with Guy Knaggs first. It will be seen 
22 


A Boy About Town 

that with all his sensibilities the youngest Upton 
was a most casual and sanguine youth. He 
took a great deal for granted, prepared only for 
the best, and although inclined to worry over 
the irrevocable, took no thought for the morrow 
until he was obliged. He was sorry he had been 
so positive with Spearman on the subject of his 
friends’ hospitality. He was sorry he had asked 
and been refused, rather sorry he had not caught 
that last train back from St. Pancras. Yet he 
left poor Miss Harbottle the best part of another 
hour to go to bed in; and that was neither the 
first nor the last of his erratic proceedings. 

“What about your luggage?” asked the elder 
Knaggs, as he put on his hat to walk round with 
Pocket. 

“Good Lord!” cried that worthy, standing 
still in the hall. 

“Haven’t you got any?” 

“I left it at Madame Tussaud’s!” 

“Left your luggage there?” 

“It was only a hand bag. How long are they 

3 >> 

open f 

Young Knaggs looked in Whitaker and said 
they closed at ten. There was still time to re¬ 
cover the bag with a taxicab, but in that case it 
was not much use his going too. So they said 
23 


The Camera Fiend 

good-by at the Swiss Cottage, and the adventures 
of Pocket Upton began in earnest. 

Old Miss Harbottle, his mother’s great friend, 
would have none of him either! He stopped on 
the way to Baker Street to make sure. The 
garden gate was one that only opened by a catch 
and a cable manipulated indoors. The down¬ 
stairs lights were out. The gate opened at last, 
a light shone through the front door, and the 
door opened a few inches on the chain. Pocket 
confronted a crevice of quilted dressing-gown 
and gray curls; but his mother’s friend’s mastiff 
was making night so hideous within, and trying 
so hard to get at his mother’s son, that it was 
some time before he could exchange an intelli¬ 
gible word with the brute’s mistress. It was not 
a satisfactory interchange then, for Miss Harbottle 
at first flatly refused to believe that this was Tony 
Upton, whom she had not seen since his prepara¬ 
tory school-days, and she seemed inclined to doubt 
it to the end. Upton or no Upton, she could not 
take him in. She had no sheets aired, no fire to 
air them at, and the cook had just left. Miss 
Harbottle’s cook had always just left, except when 
she was just leaving. The rejected visitor got an 
instant’s fun out of the reflection as he returned 
to his palpitating taxicab. 

24 


A Boy About Town 

His position was now quite serious. He had 
not many shillings in his purse. The only thing 
to do was to put up at Shaw’s Hotel, Trafalgar 
Square; that was where his people always stayed, 
where every servant was supposed to know them 
all. He pushed on at once through the cool 
June night, and paid away three of his last shill¬ 
ings for the drive. Alas! not a bed to be had at 
Shaw’s; it was the worst time of the year, they 
told him, and he supposed they meant the best. 
He also supposed there had been changes in the 
staff, for nobody seemed to know his name as well 
as he had been led to expect at home. 

They were quite nice about it. They pointed 
out the big hotels opposite, and recommended 
more than one of the little ones in Craven Street. 
But the big hotels were all full to overflowing; 
and at the only little one he tried the boy lost his 
temper like a man on being requested to deposit 
six shillings before proceeding to his room. 
Pocket had not got it to deposit, and the galling 
reflection caused him to construe the demand as 
a deliberate reflection upon his outward respect¬ 
ability—as if he could not have borrowed the 
money from Dr. Bompas in the morning! 

“I’ll see you blowed,” was his muttered reply, 
and he caught up his bag in a passion. 

25 


The Camera Fiend 

“All right, little man! I shouldn’t be rude 
about it,” said the dapper cashier. “If I couldn’t 
pay my shot I should sleep in the Park, on a nice 
fine night like this.” 

“I shall!” shouted Pocket through his teeth, 
as though that would prevent the brute of a 
cashier from sleeping soundly in his bed. And 
it was his own idle and childish threat that set 
him presently wondering what else he was to 
do. 

He had the spirit of adventure, as we have 
seen. He had the timorous, or let us say the 
imaginative temperament, which lends to ad¬ 
venture its very salt. He wished to have done 
dangerous or heroic things, if not to have to do 
them. He had so little to boast about; his brothers, 
and so many other fellows of his own age, had 
so much. It would make a great yarn some 
day, how he had come up from school to see a 
doctor—and slept in the Park! 

Meanwhile he had only a vague idea of his 
way there; he knew hardly anything of London 
except St. John’s Wood and his present land¬ 
mark of the Nelson column and the Landseer 
lions. He knew them from having stayed some 
time (under another doctor) as a child at Shaw’s 
Hotel. But, I say! What would Bompas say to 
26 


A Boy About Town 

his sleeping out, and what sort of night could he 
expect in the open air ? 

He had an overcoat. It had been in his way 
all day; it would come in more than handy for 
the night. And it suddenly struck Pocket, with 
all the force of a forgotten novelty, that he had 
a revolver and cartridges as well. 

That decided him. Not that he seriously 
thought himself the kind of person to use a 
revolver with resolution or effect; but it made 
him feel doughty and even truculent to find the 
means of heroic defence all ready to his hand. 
He began to plume himself on his providential 
purchase. He would sell his young life dearly 
if he fell among London thieves; in his death he 
would not be unhonored at school or at home. 
Obituary phrases of a laudatory type sprang 
like tears to a mind still healthy enough to dash 
them away again, as though they had been real 
tears; but it was with all the nervous exaltation 
of the unsuspected desperado that he inquired his 
way of a colossal constable at the corner of Pall 
Mall and the Haymarket. 

The man wanted to know if he meant Hyde 
Park Corner. “Yes,” said Pocket, hastily, be¬ 
cause his heart was in his mouth and the police¬ 
man looked as though he had seen it there. 
27 


The Camera Fiend 

And he overshot the mark in the motor omni¬ 
bus through being ashamed to ask again, only 
alighting at Albert Gate; but here there was 
quite a little stream of decent people to follow 
without further tremors into the indubitable Park. 

He followed them across the drive and across 
Rotten Row, gaining confidence as he went. In 
a minute it was all delightful; his eyes were 
turned outward by all there was to see; and 
now his chief fear was lest some one or other 
of the several passers should stand in his path 
and ask what he was doing there. He was 
still afraid of speaking or being spoken to, but 
no longer unreasonably so. Detection as an es¬ 
caped school-boy was his one great dread; he 
felt he was doing something for which he might 
be expelled. 

But nobody took any notice of him; this grad¬ 
ually encouraged him to take more notice of 
other people, when he found, not altogether to 
his surprise, that the majority of those passing 
through the Park at that late hour were hardly 
of his own class. So much the more infinites¬ 
imal were the chances of his being recognized 
or even suspected for what he was. There were 
young men in straw hats, there were red-coated 
soldiers, and there were girls. They all filled 
28 


A Boy About Town 

the school-boy with their fascinating possibilities. 
They were Life. The boy’s heart beat at what 
he heard and saw. The couples were hilarious 
and unrefined. One wench, almost under his 
nose, gave her soldier a slap with such a remark 
as Pocket had never heard from a woman’s lips 
before. He turned away, tingling, and leant 
upon the parapet of a bridge he had been in 
the act of crossing, and thought of school and 
home and Mr. Coverley. 

It was not really a bridge at all. It was only 
the eastern extremity of the Serpentine; but as 
the boy leant over the stone balustrade, and 
gazed upon the artificial flood, broadening out 
indefinitely in the darkness, it might have been 
the noblest river in the world. Its banks were 
muffled in a feather boa of trees, bedizened by 
a chain of many lights; the lights of a real bridge 
made a diadem in the distance; and between 
these sped the lamps of invisible vehicles, like 
fretful fireflies. And the still water gave back 
every glimmer with its own brilliance, unchal¬ 
lenged and undimmed by moon or star, for not a 
trace of either was in the sky; and yet it was the 
most wonderful sky the boy had ever seen—a 
black sky tinged with sullen rose, or a red sky 
seen through smoked glasses, he hardly knew 
29 


The Camera Fiend 

which he would have called it. But he did 
know that warm and angry glow for the reflection 
of London’s light and life; he could not forget 
he was in London for a moment. Her mighty 
machinery with its million wheels throbbed per¬ 
petually in his ears; and yet between the beats 
would come the quack of a wild-duck near at 
hand, the splash of a leaping fish, the plaintive 
whistle of water-fowl: altogether such a chorus 
of incongruities as was not lost upon our very 
impressionable young vagabond. 

The booming strokes of eleven recalled him 
to a sense of time and his immediate needs. 
His great adventure was still before him; he 
pushed on, bag in hand, to select its scene. An¬ 
other road he crossed, alive with the lamps of 
cyclists, and came presently upon a wide space 
intersected with broad foot-paths from which he 
shrank; it was altogether too public here; he 
was approaching an exposed corner in an angle 
of lighted streets, with the Marble Arch at its 
apex, as a sign-board made quite clear. He had 
come right across the Park; back over the grass, 
keeping rather more to the right, in the direction 
of those trees, was the best thing now. 

It was here that he found the grass distinctly 
damp; this really was enough to deter an asth- 
30 


A Boy About Town 

matic, already beginning to feel asthmatical. 
Pocket Upton, however, belonged to the large 
class of people, weak and strong alike, who are 
more than loth to abandon a course of action 
once taken. It would have required a very 
severe attack to balk him of his night out and 
its subsequent description to electrified ears. 
But when bad steering had brought him up at 
the band stand, the deserted chairs seemed an 
ordained compromise between prudence and au¬ 
dacity, and he had climbed into the fenced en¬ 
closure when another enormous policeman rose 
up horribly in its midst. 

“ What are you doing here ?” inquired this police¬ 
man, striding upon Pocket with inexorable tread. 

“No harm, I hope,” replied our hero humbly, 
but with unusual readiness. 

“Nor no good either, I’ll be bound!” said the 
policeman, standing over him. 

“I was only going to sit down,” protested 
Pocket, having satisfied his conscience that in 
the first place that was all he really had been 
going to do. 

“There are plenty of places to sit down,” 
rejoined the policeman. “You’re not allowed in 
here. And unless you look sharp about it you 
won’t have time to sit down at all.” 

3 1 


The Camera Fiend 


“Why not?” 

“The Park closes at twelve.” 

“Closes ?” 

“At twelve o’clock, and it’s half-past eleven 
now.” 

The boy’s heart sank into his wet boots. Here 
was an end of all his dashing plans. He was 
certain he had heard or read of people sleeping 
in the Park; he had looked upon it as a vast 
dormitory of the houseless; that was the only 
reason he was there. The offensive clerk in the 
hotel had evidently entertained the same belief. 
This idiot of a policeman must be wrong. But 
he seemed quite clear about it. 

“Did you think we were open all night?” he 
inquired with a grin. 

“I did,” said Pocket; and he was inspired to 
add, “I even thought a lot of loafers used to 
sleep here all night!” 

The policeman chuckled aloud. 

“They may if they get up the trees; that’s 
about their only chance,” said he. 

“You search the whole place so thoroughly?” 

“We keeps our eyes open,” said the police¬ 
man significantly, and Pocket asked no more 
questions; he scaled the forbidden fence and 
made off with the alacrity of one who meant to 
32 


A Boy About Town 

go out before he was put out. Such was his 
then sincere and sound intention. But where next 
to turn, to what seat on the Embankment, or 
what arch in the slums, in his ignorance of Lon¬ 
don he had no idea. 

Meanwhile, to increase the irony of his dilemma, 
now that he was bent on quitting the Park, he 
found himself striking deeper and deeper into 
its heart. He skirted a building, left it behind 
and out of sight, and drifted before the wind of 
destiny between an upright iron fence on one 
hand and a restricted open space upon the other. 
He could no longer see a single light; but the 
ground rose abruptly across the fence, and was 
thick with shrubs. Men might have been lying 
behind those shrubs, and Pocket could not possi¬ 
bly have seen them from the path. Did the 
policeman mean to tell him that he or his com¬ 
rades were going to climb every fence and look 
behind every bush in Hyde Park ? 

Pocket came to anchor with a new flutter at 
his heart. This upright fence was not meant 
for scaling; it was like a lot of area palings, as 
obvious and intentional an obstacle. And the 
whole place closed at twelve, did it ? The flutter 
became a serious agitation as Pocket saw him¬ 
self breaking the laws of the land as well as those 

33 


The Camera Fiend 


of school, saw himself not only expelled but put 
in prison! Well, so much the better for his story 
so long as those penalties were not incurred; even 
if they were, so much the greater hero he! 

No wonder his best friends called him dispar¬ 
aging names; he was living up to the hardest of 
them now, and he with asthma on him as it was! 
But the will was on him too, the obstinate and 
reckless will, and the way lay handy in the shape 
of a row of Park chairs which Pocket had just 
passed against the iron palings. He went back 
to them, mounted on the first chair, wedged his 
bag between two of the spikes, set foot on the 
back of the chair, and somehow found himself 
on the other side without rent or scratch. Then 
he listened; but not a step could he hear. So then 
the cunning dog put his handkerchief through 
the palings and wiped the grit from the chair on 
which he had stood. And they called him a 
conscientious ass at school. 

But then none of these desperate deeds were 
against his conscience, and they had all been 
thrust on Pocket Upton by circumstances over 
which he had lost control when the last train 
went without him from St. Pancras. They did 
not prevent him from kneeling down behind the 
biggest bush that he could find, before curling 
34 


A Boy About Town 

up underneath it; neither did his prayers pre¬ 
vent him from thinking—even on his knees—of 
his revolver, nor yet—by the force of untimely 
association—of the other revolvers in the Chamber 
of Horrors. He saw those waxen wretches hud¬ 
dled together in ghastly groups, but the thought 
of them haunted him less than it might have 
done in a feather bed; he had his own perils and 
adventures to consider now. One thing, how¬ 
ever, did come of the remembrance; he detached 
the leather strap he wore as a watch-guard, and 
used it to strap a pin-fire revolver, loaded in every 
chamber, to his wrist instead. 

That was the last but one of the silly boy’s 
proceedings under the bush; the last of all was 
to drain the number-one draught prescribed by 
Bompas in the morning, and to fling away the 
phial. The stuff was sweet and sticky in the 
mouth, and Pocket felt a singular and most grate¬ 
ful warmth at his extremities as he curled up in 
his overcoat. It was precisely then that he heard 
a measured tread approaching, and held his breath 
until it had passed without a pause. Yet the 
danger was still audible when the boy dropped 
off, thinking no more about it, but of Mr. Cover- 
ley and Charles Peace and his own people down 
in Leicestershire. 


35 


CHAPTER III 


His People 

I T so happened that his people in Leicester¬ 
shire were thinking of him. They had been 
talking about him at the very time of the boy’s 
inconceivable meanderings in Hyde Park. And 
two of them were at it still. 

On a terrace outside lighted windows a power¬ 
ful young fellow, in a butterfly collar and a corded 
smoking-jacket, was walking up and down with 
a tall girl not unlike him in the face; but their 
faces were only to be seen in glimpses as they 
passed the drawing-room windows, and at not 
less regular intervals when a red light in the sky, 
the source of which was concealed by the garden 
foliage, became positively brilliant. The air was 
sweet with the scent of honeysuckle and musk- 
roses and mown grass; midges fretted in and out 
of the open windows. But for the lurid lighting 
of the sky, with its Cyclopean suggestion of some 
mammoth forge, you were in the heart of Eng¬ 
land undefiled. 


36 


His People 

"It’s no use our talking about Tony,” the tall 
girl said. “I think you’re frightfully down on 
him; we shall never agree.” 

“Not as long as you make a fool of the fellow,” 
said the blunt young man. 

“Tony’s no fool,” remarked Lettice Upton, 
irrelevantly enough. 

“You know what I mean,” snapped her brother 
Horace. “He’s being absolutely spoilt, and you’re 
at the bottom of it.” 

“I didn’t give him asthma!” 

“Don’t be childish, Letty.” 

“But that’s what’s spoiling his life.” 

“I wasn’t talking about his life. I don’t believe 
it, either.” 

“You think he enjoys his bad nights?” 

“I think he scores by them. He’d tell you 
himself that he never even thinks of getting up 
to first school now.” 

“Would you if you’d been sitting up half the 
night with asthma ?” 

“Perhaps not; but I don’t believe that happens 
so often as you think.” 

“It happens often enough to justify him in mak¬ 
ing one good night pay for two or three bad ones.” 

“I don’t call that playing the game. I call 
it shamming.” 


37 


The Camera Fiend 

‘‘Well, if it is, he makes up for it. They 
were doing Ancient Greek Geography in his 
form at early school last term. Tony tackled 
it in his spare time, and got most marks in the 
exam. ,, 

“Beastly young swot!” quoth his elder brother. 
“I’m glad he didn’t buck to me about that.” 

“I don’t think there’s much danger of his buck¬ 
ing to you,” said Lettice, smiling in the red light. 
She did not add as her obvious reason that Horace, 
like many another athletic young man, was quite 
incapable of sympathizing with the non-athletic 
type. But he guessed that she meant something 
of the sort, and having sensibilities of his own, 
and a good heart somewhere in his mesh of mus¬ 
cles, he felt hurt. 

“I looked after him all right,” said Horace, 
“the one term we were there together. So did 
Fred for the next year. But it’s rather rough on 
Fred and myself, who were both something in 
the school at his age, to hear and see for ourselves 
that Tony’s nobody even in the house!” 

Lettice slipped a sly hand under the great biceps 
of her eldest brother. 

“But don’t you see, old boy, that it makes it 
all the worse for Tony that you and Fred were 
what you were at school ? They measure him by 
38 


His People 

the standard you two set up; it’s natural enough, 
but it isn’t fair.” 

“He needn’t be a flyer at games,” said Horace, 
duly softened by a little flattery. “But he might 
be a tryer!” 

“Wait till we get a little more breath into his 
body.” 

“A bag of oxygen wouldn’t make him a crick¬ 
eter.” 

“Yet he’s so keen on cricket!” 

“I wish he wasn’t so keen; he thinks and talks 
more about it than Fred or I did when we were in the 
eleven, yet he never looked like making a player.” 

“I should say he thinks and talks more about 
most things; it’s his nature, just as it’s Fred’s 
and yours to be men of action.” 

“Well, I’m glad he’s not allowed to cumber 
the crease this season,” said Horace, bowling his 
cigarette-end into the darkness with a distinct 
swerve in the air. “To have him called our 
‘pocket-edition,’ on the cricket-field of all places, 
is a bit too thick.” 

Lettice withdrew her sympathetic hand. 

“He’s as good a sportsman as either of you, 
at heart,” she said warmly. “And I hope he 
may make you see it before this doctor’s done 
with him!” 


39 


The Camera Fiend 


“This doctor!” jeered Horace, quick to echo 
her change of tone as well. “You mean the fool 
who wanted to send that kid round the world 
on his own?” 

“He’s no fool, Horace, and you know nothing 
whatever about him.” 

“No; but I know something about our Tony! 
If he took the least care of himself at home, there 
might be something to be said for letting him go; 
but he’s the most casual young hound I ever 
struck.” 

“I know he’s casual.” 

Lettice made the admission with reluctance; 
next moment she was sorry her sense of fairness 
had so misled her. 

“Besides,” said Horace, “he wouldn’t be cured 
if he could. Think what he’d miss!” 

“Oh, if you’re coming back to that, there’s no 
more to be said.” 

And the girl halted at the lighted windows. 

“ But I do come back to it. Isn’t he up in town at 
this very moment under this very doctor of yours ?” 

“He’s not my doctor.” 

“But you first heard about him; you’re the 
innovator of the family, Letty, so it’s no use try¬ 
ing to score off me. Isn’t Tony up in London 
to-night?” 


40 


His People 

“I believe he is.” 

^Then Pll tell you what he’s doing at this mo¬ 
ment,” cried Horace, with egregious confidence, 
as he held his watch to the windows. “It’s 
after eleven; he’s in the act of struggling out of 
some theatre, where the atmosphere’s so good 
for asthma!” 

Lettice left the gibe unanswered. It was 
founded on recent fact which she had been the 
first to deplore when Tony made no secret of it 
in the holidays; indeed, she was by no means blind 
to his many and obvious failings; but they inter¬ 
ested her more than the equally obvious virtues of 
her other brothers, whose unmeasured objurga¬ 
tions drove her to the opposite extreme in special 
pleading. She tried to believe that there was more 
in her younger brother than in any of them, and 
would often speak up for him as though she had 
succeeded. It may have been merely a woman’s 
weakness for the weak, but Lettice had taught 
herself to believe in Tony. And perhaps of all 
his people she was the only one who could have 
followed his vagaries of that night without think¬ 
ing the worse of him. 

But she had no more to say to Horace about 
the matter, and would have gone in-doors with¬ 
out another word if Mr. Upton had not come out 
4i 


The Camera Fiend 


hastily at that moment. He had been looking 
for her everywhere, he declared with some asperity. 
Her mother could not sleep, and wished to see 
her; otherwise it was time they were all in bed, 
and what there was to talk about till all hours 
was more than he could fathom. So he saw the 
pair before him through the lighted rooms, a heavy 
man with a flaming neck and a smouldering eye. 
Horace would be heavy, too, when his bowling 
days were over. The girl was on finer lines; but 
she looked like a woman at her worst; tired, ex¬ 
asperated, and clearly older than her brother, but 
of other clay. 

That young man smoked a last cigarette in his 
father’s library, and unhesitatingly admitted the 
subject of dissension and dissent upon the terrace. 

“I said he wasn’t doing much good there,” he 
added, “and I don’t think he is. Letty stood up 
for him, as she always does.” 

“Do you mean that he’s doing any harm?” 
asked Mr. Upton plainly. 

“Not for a moment. I never said there was 
any harm in Tony. I—I sometimes wish there 
was more!” 

“More manhood, I suppose you’d call it?” 

Mr. Upton spoke with a disconcerting grim¬ 
ness. 


42 


His People 

“More go about him,” said Horace. He could 
not say as much to his father as he had to Letty. 
That was evident. But he was not the boy to 
bolt from his guns. 

“Yet you know how much he has to take all 
that out of him?” continued Mr. Upton, with 
severity. 

“I know,” said Horace hastily, “and of course 
that’s really why he’s doing no good; but I must 
say that doctor of his doesn’t seem to be doing 
him any either.” 

Mr. Upton got excitedly to his feet, and Horace 
made up his mind to the downright snub that 
he deserved. But by a lucky accident Horace 
had turned the wrath that had been gathering 
against himself into quite another quarter. 

“I agree with you there!” cried his father vehe¬ 
mently. “I don’t believe in the man myself; but 
he was recommended by the surgeon who has 
done so much for your poor mother, so what could 
one do but give him a trial ? The lad wasn’t 
having a fair chance at school. This looked like 
one. But I dislike his going up to town so often, 
and I dislike the letters the man writes me about 
him. He’d have me take him away from school 
altogether, and pack him off to Australia in a 
sailing ship. But what’s to be done with a boy 
43 


The Camera Fiend 

like that when we get him back again ? He’d 
be too old to go to another school, and too young 
for the University: no use at the works, and only 
another worry to us all.” 

Mr. Upton spoke from the full heart of an 
already worried man, not with intentional un¬ 
kindness, but yet with that unimaginative want 
of sympathy which is often the instinctive atti¬ 
tude of the sound toward the unsound. He hated 
sickness, and seemed at present surrounded by it. 
His wife had taken ill the year before, had under¬ 
gone a grave operation in the winter, and was 
still a great anxiety to him. But that was another 
and a far more serious matter; he had patience 
and sympathy enough with his wife. The case 
of the boy was very different. Himself a man of 
much bodily and mental vigor, Mr. Upton ex¬ 
pected his own qualities of his own children; he 
had always resented their apparent absence in his 
youngest born. The others were good specimens; 
why should Tony be a weakling ? Was he such 
a weakling as was made out ? Mr. Upton was 
often sceptical on the point; but then he had always 
heard more about the asthma than he had seen 
for himself. If the boy was not down to break¬ 
fast in the holidays, he was supposed to have had 
a bad night; yet later in the day he would be as 
44 


His People 

bright as anybody, at times indeed the brightest 
of the party. That, however, was usually when 
Lettice drew him out in the absence of the two 
athletes; he was another creature then, excitable, 
hilarious, and more capable of taking the busy 
man out of himself than any of his other children. 
But Lettice overdid matters; she made far too 
much of the boy and his complaint, and was in¬ 
clined to encourage him in random remedies. 
Cigarettes at his age, even if said to be cigarettes 
for asthma, suggested a juvenile pose to the 
man who had never studied that disorder. The 
specialist in London seemed another mistake 
on the part of that managing Lettice, who had 
quite assumed the family lead of late. And 
altogether Mr. Upton, though he saw the mat¬ 
ter from a different point of view, was not far 
from agreeing with his eldest son about his 
youngest. 

And what chance was there for a boy whose 
own father thought he posed, whose brothers con¬ 
sidered him a bit of a malingerer and his school¬ 
fellows “a conscientious ass,” while his sister spoilt 
him for un enfant incompris? You may say it 
would have taken a miracle to make an ordinary 
decent fellow of him. Well, it was a night of 
strange happenings to the boy and his people; 

45 


The Camera Fiend 

perhaps it was the one authentic type of miracle 
that capped all in the morning. 

The father had gone to bed at midnight, after 
an extra allowance of whisky-and-water to take 
the extra worry off his mind; it did so for a few 
hours, only to stretch him tragically awake in the 
early morning. The birds were singing down in 
Leicestershire as in Hyde Park. The morning 
sun was slanting over town and country, and the 
father’s thoughts were with his tiresome son in 
town. Suddenly a shrill cry came from the ad¬ 
joining room. 

In a trice the wakeful man was at his sick wife’s 
side, supporting her in bed as she sat up wildly 
staring, trembling in his arms. 

“Tony!” she gasped. “My Tony!” 

“ I was just thinking of him! ” he cried. “ What 
about him, dear?” 

“I saw him,” she quavered. “I saw him 
plainer than I see you now. And I’m almost 
positive I heard—a shot!” 


46 


CHAPTER IV 


A Grim Samaritan 

T HOUGH he afterward remembered a shout 
as well, it actually was the sound of a shot 
that brought the boy to his senses in Hyde Park. 
He opened his eyes on a dazzle of broad daylight 
and sparkling grass. The air was strangely keen 
for the amount of sunshine, the sunshine curiously 
rarefied, and the grass swept gray where it did 
not sparkle. 

Pocket’s first sensation was an empty stomach, 
and his next a heavy head into which the puzzle 
of his position entered by laborious steps. He 
was not in bed. He was not at school. He was 
not even under the shrub he now remembered in 
a mental flash which lit up all his adventures over¬ 
night. He was wandering ankle deep in the dew, 
toward a belt of poplars like birch-rods on the 
sky-line, and a row of spiked palings right in front 
of his nose. He had walked in his sleep for the 
first time for years, and some one had fired a shot 
to wake him. 


47 


The Camera Fiend 

Slow as these automatic discoveries had seemed, 
they had been in reality so swift that the report 
was still ringing in his ears when he who must 
have made it sprang hideously into being across 
the palings. A hand darted through them and 
caught Pocket’s wrist as in a vice. And he looked 
up over the spikes into a gnarled face tinged with 
fear and fury, and working spasmodically at the 
suppression of some incomprehensible emotion. 

“Do you know what you did?” the man de¬ 
manded in the end. The question seemed an 
odd one, but a very slight foreign accent, not to 
be reproduced phonetically, corresponded with the 
peculiarity of tense, reminding Pocket of the music- 
masters at his school. It was less easy to account 
for the tone employed, which was low in pitch 
and tremulous with passion. And the man stood 
tall and dominant, with a silver stubble on an 
iron jaw, and a weird cloak and hat that helped 
to invest him with the goblin dignity of a Spanish 
inquisitor; no wonder his eyes were like cold steel 
in quivering flesh. 

“I must have been walking in my sleep,” began 
Pocket shakily; further explanations were cut 
very short. 

“Sleep!” echoed the other, in bitter unbelief. 

Pocket felt his prime quality impugned. 

48 


A Grim Samaritan 

“Well? I can’t help it! I’ve done it before 
to-day; you needn’t believe me if you don’t like! 
Do you mind letting go of my hand ?” 

“With that in it!” 

The scornful tone made the boy look down, 
and there was the pistol he had strapped to his 
wrist, not only firm in his unconscious clasp, but 
his finger actually on the trigger. 

“You don’t mean to say I let it off?” cried 
Pocket horrified. 

“Feel the barrel.” 

The tall man had done so first. Pocket touched 
it with his left hand. The barrel was still warm. 

“It was in my sleep,” protested Pocket, in a 
wheezy murmur. 

“I’m glad to hear it.” 

“I tell you it was.” 

The tall man opened his lips impulsively, but 
shut them on a second impulse. The daggers 
in his eyes probed deeper into those of the boy, 
picking his brains, transfixing the secrets of his 
soul. No master’s eye had ever delved so deep 
into his life; he felt as though the very worst of 
him at school was known in an instant to this 
dreadful stranger in the wilds of London. He 
writhed under the ordeal of that protracted scruti¬ 
ny. He tugged to free his imprisoned wrist. His 
49 


The Camera Fiend 

captor was meanwhile fumbling with a penknife 
in his unoccupied hand. A blade was slowly 
opened; the leather watch-guard was sliced 
through in a second; the revolver dropped harm¬ 
lessly into the dew. The man swooped down and 
whipped it through the railings with a snarl of 
satisfaction. 

“And now,” said he, releasing Pocket, but stand¬ 
ing by with his weapon, “I suppose you know 
that, apart from everything else, you had no right 
to spend the night in here at all ?” 

The boy, already suffering from his humiliat¬ 
ing exertions, gasped out, “Tm not the only one!” 
He had just espied a recumbent figure through 
the palings; it was that of a dilapidated creature 
lying prone, a battered hat beside him, on the 
open grass beyond the path. The tall man merely 
redoubled his scrutiny of the face in front of him, 
without so much as a glance behind. 

“That,” said he, “is the sort that staggers in 
as soon as the gates are open, and spends the day 
sleeping itself sober. But you are not that sort 
at all, and you have spent the night here contrary 
to the rules. Who are you, and what’s the matter 
with you ?” 

“Asthma,” wheezed Pocket, clinging to the pal¬ 
ings in dire distress. 


5° 


mm 



He tugged to free his imprisoned wrist 






























































































A Grim Samaritan 

“So I thought. Yet you spend your night on 
the wet grass!” 

“ I had nowhere else to go.” 

“Have you come up from the country?” 

“To see a doctor about it!” cried Pocket bitterly, 
and told the whole truth about himself in a series 
of stertorous exclamations. It scarcely lessened 
the austerity of the eyes that still ran him through 
and through; but the hard mouth did relax a little; 
the lined face looked less deeply slashed and fur¬ 
rowed, and it was a less inhuman voice that uttered 
the next words. 

“Well, we must get you out of this, my young 
fellow! Come to these chairs.” 

Pocket crept along the palings toward the chairs 
by which he had climbed them. His breathing 
was pitiful now. The stranger accompanied him 
on the other side. 

“If I lift one over, and lend you a hand, do you 
think you can manage it?” 

“I did last night.” 

“Here, then. Wait a bit! Can you tell me 
where you slept?” 

Pocket looked round and pointed. 

“Behind that bush.” 

“Have you left nothing there ?” 

“Yes; my bag and hat!” 

5i 


The Camera Fiend 

In his state it took him some time to go and 
fetch them; he was nearly suffocating when he 
came creeping back, his shoulders up to his ears. 

“Stop! I see something else. Is that medicine 
bottle yours ? There—catching the sun.” 

“It was.” 

“Bring it.” 

“It’s empty.” 

“Bring it!” 

Pocket obeyed. The strange man was stand¬ 
ing on a chair behind the palings, waiting to 
help him over, with a wary eye upon the path. 
But no third creature was in sight except the in¬ 
sensate sprawler in the dew. Pocket surmounted 
the obstacle, he knew not how; he was almost 
beside himself in the throes of his attack. Later, 
he feared he must have been lifted down like a 
child; but this was when he was getting his breath 
upon a seat. They had come some little distance 
very slowly, and Pocket had received such support 
from so muscular an arm as to lend color to his 
humiliating suspicion. 

His grim companion spoke first. 

“Well, I’m sorry for you. But I feel for your 
doctor too. I am one myself.” 

Pocket ignored the somewhat pointed state¬ 
ment. 


52 


A Grim Samaritan 

‘Til never forgive the brute!” he panted. 

“Come, come! He didn’t send you to sleep 
in the Park.” 

“ But he took away the only thing that does me 
any good.” 

“What’s that?” 

“Cigarettes d’Auvergne.” 

“I never heard of them.” 

“They’re the only thing to stop it, and he took 
away every one I had.” 

But even as he spoke Pocket remembered the 
cigarette he had produced from his bag, but lacked 
the moral courage to light, in the train. He had 
slipped it into one of his pockets, not back into 
the box. He felt for it feverishly. He gave a 
husky cheer as his fingers closed upon the palpable 
thing, and he drew forth a flattened cylinder the 
size of a cigarette and the color of a cigar. The 
boy had to bite off both ends; the man was ready 
with the match. Pocket drank the crude smoke 
down like water, coughed horribly, drank deeper, 
coughed the tears into his eyes, and was compar¬ 
atively cured. 

“And your doctor forbids a sovereign remedy!” 
said his companion. “I cannot understand him, 
and I’m a doctor myself.” His voice and look 
were deliberate even for him. “My name is 

53 


The Camera Fiend 

Baumgartner,” he added, and made a pause. “I 
don’t suppose you know it ?” 

“I’m not sure I don’t,” replied Pocket, swell¬ 
ing with breath and gratitude; but in truth the 
name seemed vaguely familiar to him. 

“A school-boy in the country,” observed Dr. 
Baumgartner, “is scarcely likely to have heard of 
me; but if you inquire here in London you will 
find that I am not unknown. I propose to carry 
you off to my house for breakfast and a little 
rest. That is,” added the doctor, with his first 
smile, “if you will trust yourself to me first and 
make your inquiries later.” 

Pocket scouted the notion of inquiries in an 
impulsive outburst; but even as he proceeded to 
mumble out his thanks he could not help feeling 
it would have been less embarrassing to know more 
exactly whom he was thanking and must needs 
accompany now. Dr. Baumgartner ? Where was 
it he had come across that name ? And when 
and where had anybody ever seen such a doctor 
as this unshaven old fellow in the cloak and hat of 
a conspirator by lime-light ? 

But the school-boy had still to learn the lesson 
of naked personality as the one human force; 
and he learnt it now unknown to himself. The 
gaunt gray man stood up in his absurd and rusty 
54 


A Grim Samaritan 

raiment, and Pocket thought, “How the chaps 
would rag him at school!” because the dreadful 
old hat and cloak suggested a caricature of a 
master’s cap and gown. But there was no master 
at Pocket’s school whom he would not sooner 
have disobeyed than this shabby stranger with 
the iron-bound jaw and the wintry smile; there 
was no eye on the staff that had ever made him 
quail as he had quailed that morning before these 
penetrating eyes of steel. Baumgartner said they 
must hurry, and Pocket had his asthma back in 
the first few yards. Baumgartner said they could 
buy more cigarettes on the way, and Pocket kept 
up, panting, at his side. 

In the cab Baumgartner said, “Try sitting with 
your head between your knees.” Pocket tried 
it like a lamb. They had encountered a young 
man or so hurrying into the Park with towels 
round the neck but no collar, an early cavalcade 
who never looked at them, and that was about 
all until the hansom had been hailed outside. Dur¬ 
ing the drive, which seemed to Pocket intermina¬ 
ble, his extraordinary attitude prevented him from 
seeing anything but his own boots, and those only 
dimly owing to the apron being shut and indeed 
pressing uncomfortably against his head. Yet 
when Dr. Baumgartner inquired whether that did 

55 


The Camera Fiend 


not make him easier, he said it did. It was not 
all imagination either; the posture did relieve him; 
but it was none the less disagreeable to be driven 
through London by an utter stranger, and not to 
see the names of the streets or a single landmark. 
Pocket had not even heard the cabman’s instruc¬ 
tions where to drive; they had been given after 
he got in. His ear was more alert now. He 
noted the change from wood-paving to rough 
metal. Then more wood, and an indubitable 
omnibus blundering by; then more metal, in bet¬ 
ter repair; quieter streets, the tinkle of cans, the 
milkman’s queer cry; and finally, “Next to the 
right and the fifth house on your left,” in the 
voice with the almost imperceptibly foreign ac¬ 
cent. 

The fifth house on the left was exactly like the 
fourth and the sixth from the little Pocket saw of 
any of them. He was hurried up a tiled path, 
none too clean, between swarthy and lack-lustre 
laurels; the steps had not been “done”; the door 
wore the nondescript complexion of prehistoric 
paint debased by the caprices of the London cli¬ 
mate. One touch of color the lad saw before this 
unpromising portal opened and shut upon him: 
he had already passed through a rank of Pollard 
trees, sprouting emeralds in the morning sun, that 

5 6 


A Grim Samaritan 

seemed common to this side of the road, and 
effectually hid the other. 

Within the doctor held up a finger and they 
both trod gently. The passage was dark and 
short. The stairs began abruptly on the right. 
Baumgartner led the way past a closed door on 
the left, into an unexpectedly bright and large 
room beyond it. “Sit down,” said he, and shut 
the door softly behind him. 

Pocket took observations from the edge of his 
chair. The room was full of walnut trivialities 
that looked aggressively obsolete in the sunshine 
that filled it and flooded a green little garden at 
the back of the house. Dr. Baumgartner had 
pulled up a blind and opened a window, and he 
stood looking out in thought while Pocket hur¬ 
riedly completed his optical round. A set of wal¬ 
nut chairs were dreadfully upholstered in faded 
tapestry; but a deep, worn one looked com¬ 
fortable enough, and a still more redeeming 
feature was the semi-grand piano. There were 
books, too, and in the far corner by the bow- 
window a glass door leading into a conserva¬ 
tory as minute as Pocket’s study at school, and 
filled with geraniums. On the walls hung a series 
of battle engravings, one representing a bloody 
advance over ridged fields in murderously close 

57 


The Camera Fiend 

formation, others the storming of heights and 
villages. 

Baumgartner met his visitor’s eyes with the faint 
cold smile that scarcely softened the hoary harsh¬ 
ness of his visage. 

“I was present at some of those engagements,” 
said he. “They were not worse than disarm¬ 
ing a man who has just fired a revolver in his 
sleep!” 

He flung his cloak upon one of the walnut chairs, 
and Pocket heard the pistol inside it rattle against 
the back; but his attention was distracted before 
he had time to resent the forgotten fact of its 
forcible confiscation. Under his cloak the doctor 
had been carrying all this time, slung by a strap 
which the boy had noticed across his chest, a 
stereoscopic camera without a case. Pocket ex¬ 
claimed upon it with the instructed interest of a 
keen photographer. 

“Do you take photographs?” asked Baumgart¬ 
ner, a reciprocal note in his unemotional voice. 

“Rather!” cried the school-boy, with consider¬ 
able enthusiasm. “It’s the only thing I have to 
do instead of playing games. But I haven’t got 
an instantaneous camera like that. I only wish 
I had!” 

And he looked with longing eyes at the sub- 

58 


A Grim Samaritan 

stantial oblong of wood and black morocco, and 
duplicate lenses like a pair of spectacles, which 
the doctor had set between them on one of the 
fussy little walnut tables. 


59 


CHAPTER V 


The Glass Eye 


D R. BAUMGARTNER produced a seasoned 
meerschaum, carved in the likeness of a 
most ferocious face, and put a pinch of dark 
tobacco through the turban into the bowl. “You 
see,” said he, “I must have my smoke like you! 
I can’t do without it either, though what is your 
misfortune is my own fault. So you are also a 
photographer!” he added, as the fumes of a mixt¬ 
ure aontaining Latakia spiced the morning air. 

“I am only a beginner,” responded Pocket, 
“but a very keen one.” 

“You don’t merely press the button and let 
them do the rest?” suggested the doctor, smiling 
less coldly under the influence of his pipe. 

“Rather not! I develop, print, tone, and all 
the rest of it; that’s half the fun.” 

“Plates or films?” inquired Baumgartner, with 
an approving nod. 

“Only plates, Pm afraid; you see, the apparatus 
is an old one of my father’s.” 

60 



The Glass Eye 

And honest Pocket was beginning to blush for 
it, when the other made a gesture more eloquent 
and far more foreign than his speech. 

“It’s none the worse for that,” said he. “So 
far we have much in common, for I always use 
plates myself. But what we put upon our plates, 
there’s the difference, eh ?” 

“I should imagine so,” said Pocket smiling. 

Dr. Baumgartner was smiling too, and still less 
coldly than before, but yet darkly to himself, and 
at the boy rather than with him. 

“You take portraits of your friends, perhaps?” 

“Yes; often.” 

“In the body, I presume?” 

Pocket looked nonplussed. 

“You only take them in the flesh ?” 

“Of course.” 

“Exactly! I take the spirit,” said the doctor; 
“that’s the difference.” 

Pocket watched the now wonderfully genial 
countenance. of Baumgartner follow the brutal 
features of the meerschaum Turk through a melt¬ 
ing cloud of smoke. The boy had been taken 
aback. But his bewilderment was of briefer du¬ 
ration than might have been the case with a less 
ardent photographer; for he took a technical in¬ 
terest in his hobby, and read the photographic 
61 


The Camera Fiend 

year-books nearly as ravenously as Wisderis 
Almanack. 

“I see,” he said lukewarmly. “You go in for 
psychic photography.” 

“Psychic,” said Baumgartner; for the public- 
school boy, one regrets to report, had pronounced 
the word to rhyme with sly-chick. The doctor 
added, with more disdain: “And you don’t believe 
in it?” 

“I didn’t say so.” 

“But you looked and sounded it!” 

“I don’t set myself up as a believer or unbeliev¬ 
er,” said the boy, always at his ease on a subject 
that attracted him. “ But I do say I don’t believe 
in the sort of thing I read somewhere last holidays. 
It was in a review of a book on that sort of photog¬ 
raphy. The chap seemed to have said you could 
get a negative of a spirit without exposing the 
plate at all; hide away your plate, never mind 
your lens, only conjure up your spirit and see what 
happens. I’ll swear nothing ever happened like 
that! There may be ghosts, you may see them, 
and so may the camera, but not without focussing 
and exposing like you’ve got to do with ordinary 
flesh and blood!” 

The youth had gone further and flown higher 
than he meant, under the stimulus of an encourage- 
62 


The Glass Eye 

ment impossible to have foreseen. And the doctor 
had come to his feet, waving eloquently with his 
pipe; his gray face beamed warmly; his eyes were 
lances tipped with fire. 

“Well said, my young fellow!” cried he. “I 
agree with every syllable you have spoken.” 

“It’s a question of photography, not of spirit¬ 
ualism,concluded Pocket, rounding off his argu¬ 
ment in high excitement. 

“I agree, I agree! All that is rubbish, pure 
moonshine; and you see it even at your age! But 
there’s much more in it than that; you must see 
the rest as well, since you see so far so clearly.” 
The boy blushed with pleasure, determined to see 
as far as anybody. “You admit there may be 
such things as ghosts, as you call them?” he was 
asked as by an equal. 

“Certainly, sir.” 

“Visible shapes, in the likeness of man? As 
visible and yet as tangible as that sunbeam?” 

“Rather!” 

“You allow that the camera can see them if 
we can ? ” 

Pocket allowed it like the man he was being 
made to feel; the concession gave him a generous 
glow. Promotion had come to him by giant leaps. 
He felt five years older in fewer minutes. 

63 


The Camera Fiend 


“Then,” cried the doctor, with further flattery 
in his air of triumph, “then you admit everything! 
You may not see these images, but I may. I may 
not see them, but my lens may! Think how 
much that glass eye throws already upon the retina 
of a sensitized film that our living lenses fail to 
throw upon ours; think of all that escapes the 
eye but the camera catches. Take two crystal 
vases, fill one with one acid and the other with 
another; one comes out like water as we see it; 
the other, though not less limpid in our sight, like 
ink. The eye sees through it, but not the lens. 
The eye sees emptiness as though the acid itself 
were pure crystal; the lens flings an inky image on 
the plate. The trouble is that, while you can pro¬ 
cure that acid at the nearest chemist’s, no money 
and no power on earth can summon or procure at 
will the spirit which once was man.” 

His voice wa«s vibrant and earnest as it had 
been when Pocket heard it first an hour earlier 
in the Park. It was even as passionate, but this 
was the passion of enthusiastic endeavor. If the 
man had a heart at all, it was in this wild question 
without a doubt. Even the school-boy perceived 
this dimly. There was something else which had 
become clearer to him with each of these later 
remarks. Striking as they seemed to him, they 
64 


The Glass Eye 

were not wholly unfamiliar. The ring of novelty 
was wanting to his ear. 

Suddenly he exclaimed, “I knew I knew your 
name!” 

“ You do know it, do you ?” 

Baumgartner spoke ungraciously, as though the 
announcement was discounted by the interruption 
it entailed. 

“It was in connection with the very book I 
mentioned. I knew I had come across it some¬ 
where.” 

“You read the correspondence that followed 
the review ?” 

“Some of it.” 

“My letter among others?” 

“Yes! I remember every word of it now.” 

“Then you recall my view as to the alleged 
necessity of a medium’s co-operation in these 
spirit-photographs ?” 

“You said it wasn’t necessary, if I remember,” 
replied Pocket somewhat tentatively, despite his 
boast. 

“It was the pith and point of my contention! 
I mentioned the two moments at which I hold 
that a man’s soul may be caught apart, may be 
cut off from his body by no other medium than a 
good sound lens in a light-tight camera. You 

65 


The Camera Fiend 

cannot have forgotten them if you read my 
letter.” 

“One,” said the boy, “was the moment of 
death.” 

“The moment of dissolution,” the doctor cor¬ 
rected him. “But there is a far commoner mo¬ 
ment than that, one that occurs constantly to us 
all, whereas dissolution comes but once.” 

Pocket believed he remembered the other in¬ 
stance too, but was not sure about it, the fact 
being that the whole momentous letter had struck 
him as too fantastic for serious consideration. 
That, however, he could not and dared not say; 
and he was not the less frightened of making a 
mistake with those inspired eyes burning fanati¬ 
cally into his. 

“The other moment,” the doctor said at last, 
with a pitying smile, “is when the soul returns to 
its prison after one of those flights which men call 
dreams. You know that theory of the dream?” 
Baumgartner asked abruptly. The answer was a 
nod as hasty, but the doctor seemed unconvinced, 
for he went on didactically: “You visit far countries 
in your dreams; your soul is the traveller. You 
speak to the absent or the dead; it is your soul 
again; and we dismiss the miracle as a dream! I 
fix the moment as that of the soul’s return because 
66 


The Glass Eye 

its departure on these errands is imperceptible, 
but with its return we awake. The theory is 
that in the moment of waking the whole ex¬ 
perience happens like the flash of an electric 
spark.” 

The boy murmured very earnestly that he saw; 
but he was more troubled than enlightened, and 
what he did see was that he had picked up a very 
eccentric acquaintance indeed. He was not a 
little scared by the man’s hard face and molten 
eyes; but there was a fascination also that could 
not be lost upon an impressionable temperament, 
besides that force of will or character which had 
dominated the young mind from the first. He 
began to wish the interview at an end—to be able 
to talk about it as the extraordinary sequel of an 
extraordinary adventure —yet he would not have 
cut it short at this point if he could. 

“I grant you,” continued the doctor, “that 
the final flight of soul from body is infinitely the 
more precious from my point of view. But how 
is one to be in a position to intercept that ? When 
beloved spirits pass it would be cold-blooded dese¬ 
cration; and public opinion has still to be educated 
up to psychical vivisection! I have myself tried 
in vain to initiate such education. I have applied 
for perfectly private admission to hospital death- 

67 


The Camera Fiend 


beds, even to the execution-shed in prisons. My 
applications have been peremptorily refused/’ 

Pocket’s thoughts went off at a grewsome tan- 
/ gent. “You could see a man hanged!” he shud¬ 
dered, and himself saw the little old effigy on the 
model drop in Marylebone Road. 

“Why not?” asked the other in wide wonder. 
“But as I am not allowed,” he continued in 
lighter key, “I have to do the best I can. If I 
cannot be in at the death, I may still by luck be 
in at a dream or two! And now you may guess 
why I wander with my camera where men come 
in to sleep in broad daylight. I prowl among 
them; a word awakens them; and then I take my 
chance.” 

“They’re not all like that man this morning, 
then,” remarked Pocket, looking back on the in¬ 
animate clod reclining in the dew. 

The doctor deliberated with half-shut eyes that 
seemed to burn the brighter for their partial eclipse. 

“This morning,” he rejoined, “was like no 
other. I owe you some confidence in the matter. 
I had the chance of a lifetime this morning— 
thanks to you!” 

“Thanks to me?” repeated Pocket. A flash 
enlightened him. “Do you mean to say I—you 

took me—walking-? ” 

68 


The Glass Eye 

“You shall see my meaning/’ replied Baum¬ 
gartner, rising. “Wait one minute.” 

He was not gone longer. Pocket heard him 
on the other side of double doors in an alcove; 
but he had gone out into the passage to get there. 
Running water and the chink of porcelain were 
specially audible in his absence, but the boy was 
thinking of another sound. The doctor before 
leaving had discarded a black alpaca jacket, light 
as a pocket-handkerchief, which had fallen so 
softly as to recall by contrast the noise made by the 
revolver in the pocket of the cloak. The lad was 
promptly seized with a strong desire to recover 
his property; he was within an ace of doing so, 
the cloak containing it being actually in his hands 
and only dropped as Baumgartner returned to 
announce that all was ready. 

Sharp to the left, at the end of the passage, was 
a door which would simply have been a second 
way into the drawing-room had the double doors 
within been in use; these being shut, the space 
behind made a separate chamber which again 
reminded the school-boy of his study, that smallest 
of small rooms. This one was as narrow, only 
twice the length. One end was monopolized by 
the door that admitted them, the other by a win¬ 
dow from floor to ceiling. And this window was 
69 


The Camera Fiend 


in two great sheets of ruby glass, so that Pocket 
looked down red-hot iron steps into a crimson 
garden, and therefrom to his companion dyed from 
head to foot like Mephistopheles. 

“This is something like a dark-room!” ex¬ 
claimed the lad as the door was shut and locked 
behind him. The folding doors were permanently 
barred by shelves and lockers; opposite was a long 
porcelain trough, pink as the doctor’s shirt-sleeves 
in the strong red light; racks of negatives and stop¬ 
pered bottles glimmered over brass taps stained 
to an angry copper. 

Everything was perfection from a photographer’s 
stand-point; the boy felt instantaneously spoilt for 
his darkened study and his jugs of water. All he 
had ever sighed for in the prosecution of his hobby 
was here in this little paradise of order and equip¬ 
ment. The actual work, he felt, would be a 
secondary consideration in such a workshop; the 
mere manipulation of such stoppered bottles as 
his host was handling now, the choice of graduated 
phials, the wealth of trays and dishes, would have 
been joy enough for him. He watched the favored 
operator with a watering mouth. A crimson blind 
had been lowered to reduce the light; the doctor 
had turned up his shirt-cuffs; his wrists were 
muscular and furry, as it now seemed with a fiery 
70 


The Glass Eye 

fur, yet they trembled with excitement as he pro¬ 
duced his plate. And Pocket remembered how 
extravagant an image was expected on that plain 
pink surface. 

He did not know whether to expect it or not 
himself. It was difficult to believe in that sort 
of thing, difficult to disbelieve in this sort of man, 
who entertained no shadow of doubt himself, whose 
excitement and suspense were as infectious as 
everything else about him. Pocket had come into 
the dark-room wheezing almost as much as ever; 
he was not to be heard breathing as the plate was 
rocked to and fro as in raspberry juice, and grad¬ 
ually the sky showed sharp and black. But the 
sky it was that puzzled Pocket first. It was bro¬ 
ken by perpendicular objects like white torpedoes. 
He was photographer enough to know what these 
were almost at once; they were those poplars in 
the Park. But how could Baumgartner have pho¬ 
tographed Pocket with those poplars behind him 
when they had been behind Baumgartner all the 
time ? 

Pocket said to himself, “Where am I, by the 
way?” and bent lower to see. His ear touched 
the doctor’s; it heard the doctor breathing as 
though he were the asthmatic; and now a human 
shape was visible, but not walking in its sleep, 

7 1 


The Camera Fiend 


lying in it like the man in the wet grass. “When 
did you get me?” asked Pocket aloud. But the 
tense crimson face paid no attention; in the ruby 
light it was glistening as though with beads of 
blood. 

“There! there! there!” croaked a voice, husky 
and yet staccato. Pocket could scarcely believe 
it was the voice of his host—the one gentle thing 
about him. “You saw the figure? Surely you 
saw something else, hovering over it ? I did, 
I swear I did! But now we shall have to 
wait.” 

The plate had blackened all over, as though 
the uncanny thing had choked out its life. It 
was meticulously held under a tap, between fin¬ 
gers that most distinctly trembled now. Then he 
plunged it in the hyposulphite and pulled up the 
blind. The sun shone again through the tail win¬ 
dows, blood-red as before; grass and sky were as 
richly incarnadined. Baumgartner babbled while 
he waited for the fixing bath to clear the plate. 
The chance of his life, he still pronounced it. “And 
I owe it to you, my young fellow!” This he said 
again and again, aloud but chiefly to himself. He 
picked up the plate at last and held it to the flaming 
window. He cried out in German to himself, a 
cry the school-boy never forgot. 

72 



1'he plate was rocked as in raspberry-juice 


































































The Glass Eye 

“Open the window!” he ordered. “It opens 
like a door.” 

Pocket did as he was told. The pure white 
sunlight struck him momentarily blind. Baum¬ 
gartner had the plate under the tap again. Pocket 
thought him careless with it, thought the tap on 
too full; it was held up an instant to the naked 
sun, and then dashed to a hundred fragments in 
the porcelain trough. 

Pocket knew better than to ask a question. 
He followed his leader back into the drawing¬ 
room and watched him pick up his coat. It 
might have been a minute before their eyes met 
again; the doctor’s were calm and cold and critical 
as in the earlier morning. It was another failure, 
he said, and nothing more. Breakfast would be 
ready soon; they would go upstairs; and if his 
young fellow felt equal to a warm bath, he thought 
as a physician it might do him good. 


73 


CHAPTER VI 


An Awakening 

I T was a normal elderly gentleman, with certain 
simple habits but no little distinction of ad¬ 
dress, who welcomed the school-boy at his break- 
fast-table. The goblin inquisitor of Hyde Park 
had vanished with his hat and cloak. The excited 
empiric of the dark-room was a creature of that 
ruby light alone. Dr. Baumgartner was shaved 
and clad like other men, the iron-gray hair care¬ 
fully brushed back from a lofty forehead, all traces 
of strong acid removed from his well-kept hands. 
There was a third person, and only a third, at 
table in the immature shape of a young lady whom 
the doctor introduced as his niece Miss Platts, 
and addressed as Phillida. 

Pocket thought he had never heard of nobler 
atonement for unmitigable surname. He could 
not help thinking that this Phillida did not look 
the one to flout a fellow, after the fashion of the 
only other Phillida he had ever heard of, and then 
74 


An Awakening 

that it was beastly cheek to start thinking of her 
like that and by her Christian name. But he 
was of the age and temperament when thoughts 
will come of contact with young animals of the 
opposite sex. He looked at her sidelong from 
time to time, but all four eyes dropped directly 
they met; she seemed as shy and uninteresting as 
himself; her conversation was confined to table 
attentions to her uncle and his guest. 

Pocket made more valiant attempts. A parlor 
billiard-table, standing against the wall, supplied 
an irresistible topic. “We have a full-size table 
at home,” he said, and could have mutilated his 
tongue that instant. “I like a small one best,” 
he assured the doctor, who shook his head and 
smiled. 

“ Honestly, sir, and snob-cricket better than the 
real thing! Pm no good at real games.” 

The statement was too true, but not the pref¬ 
erence. 

“That must be awkward for you, at an English 
public school,” was the doctor’s comment. 

Pocket heaved an ingenuous sigh. It was hate¬ 
ful. He blamed the asthma as far as modesty 
would permit. He was modest enough in his 
breakfast-table talk, yet nervously egotistical, and 
apt to involve himself in lengthy explanations. 

75 


The Camera Fiend 


He had two types of listener—the dry and the 
demure—to all he said. 

“And they let you come up to London alone!” 
remarked Dr. Baumgartner when he got a chance. 

“But it wasn’t their fault that I-” 

Pocket stopped at a glance from his host, and 
plunged into profuse particulars exonerating his 
house-master, but was cut short again. Evi¬ 
dently the niece was not to know where he had 
spent the night. 

‘I suppose there are a number of young men, 
at your—establishment?” said the doctor, ex¬ 
changing a glance with Miss Platts. 

“There are over four hundred boys,” replied 
Pocket, a little puzzled. 

“And how many keepers do they require?” 

A grin apologized for the word. 

“There must be over thirty masters,” returned 
Pocket, more pointedly than before. He was not 
going to stand chaff about his public school from 
a mad German doctor. 

r “And they arm you for the battle of life with 
Latin and Greek, eh ?” 

“Not necessarily; there’s a Modern Side. You 
can learn German if you like!” said Pocket, not 
without contempt. 

“Do you?” 


76 


An Awakening 

“I don’t like,” said the boy gratuitously. 

“Then we must stick to your excellent King’s 
English.” 

Pocket turned a trifle sulky. He felt he had 
not scored in this little passage. Then he reflected 
upon the essential and extraordinary kindness 
which had brought him to a decent breakfast- 
table that morning. That made him ashamed; 
nor could he have afforded to be too independent 
just yet, even had he been so disposed in his heart. 
His asthma was a beast that always growled in 
the background; he never knew when it would 
spring upon him with a roar. Breakfast pacified 
the brute; hot coffee always did; but the effects 
soon wore off, and the boy was oppressed again, 
yet deadly weary, long before it was time for him 
to go to Welbeck Street. 

“Is there really nothing you can take?” asked 
Dr. Baumgartner, standing over him in the draw¬ 
ing-room, where Pocket sat hunched up in the 
big easy-chair. 

“Nothing now, I’m afraid, unless I could get 
some of those cigarettes. And Dr. Bompas would 
kick up an awful row!” 

“But it’s inhuman. I’ll go and get them my¬ 
self. He should prescribe for such an emergency.” 

“He has,” said Pocket. “I’ve got some stuff 

77 


The Camera Fiend 


in my bag; but it’s no use taking it now. It’s 
meant to take in bed when you can have your 
sleep out.” 

And he was going into more elaborate details 
than Dr. Bompas had done, when the other doctor 
cut him short once more. 

“But why not now? You can sleep to your 
heart’s content in that chair; nobody will come 
in.” 

Pocket shook his head. 

“I’m due in Welbeck Street at twelve.” 

“Well, I’ll wake you at quarter to, and have a 
taxi ready at the door. That will give you a 
good two hours.” 

Pocket hesitated, remembering the blessed in¬ 
stantaneous effect of the first bottle under the 
bush. 

“Would you promise to wake me, sir ? You’re 
not going out ? ” 

“I shall be in again.” 

“Then it is a promise?” 

Pocket would have liked it in black and white. 

“Certainly, my young fellow! Is the stuff in 
your bag ?” 

It was, and the boy took it with much the same 
results as overnight. It tasted sweeter and acted 
quicker; that was the only difference. The skin 
78 


An Awakening 

seemed to tighten on his face. His lingers tingled 
at the ends. It was not at all an unpleasant sen¬ 
sation, especially as the labor in his breast came 
to an end as if by magic. The faintly foreign 
accents of Dr. Baumgartner sounded unduly 
distant in his last words from the open door. It 
was scarcely shut before the morning’s troubles 
ceased deliciously in the cosey chair. 

Yet they seemed to begin again directly, and 
this was a horrid crop! Of course he was back 
in Hyde Park; but the sky must have rained red 
paint in his absence, or else the earth was red- 
hot and the sky reflected it. No! the grass was 
too wet for that. It might have been wet with 
blood. Everything was as red as beet-root, as 
wet and red and one’s body weltering in it like 
the slain! Reddest of all was the old photographer 
who turned into Mr. Spearman in cap and gown, 
who turned into various members of the Upton 
family, one making more inconsequent remarks 
than the other, touching wildly on photography 
and the flitting soul, and between them working 
the mad race up to such a pace and pitch that 
Pocket woke with a dreadful start to find Dr. 
Baumgartner standing over him once more in the 
perfectly pallid flesh. 

“I’ve had a beast of a dream!” said Pocket, 

79 


The Camera Fiend 


waking thoroughly. “I’m in a cold perspiration, 
and I thought it was cold blood! What time is 
it?” 

“A quarter to six,” said the doctor, who had 
invited the question by taking out his watch. 

“A quarter to twelve, you mean!” 

“No—six.” 

And the boy was shown the dial, but would not 
believe it until he had gaped at his own watch, 
which had stopped at half-past three. Then he 
bounded to his feet in a puerile passion, and there 
lay the little garden, a lake of sunlight as he re¬ 
membered it, swallowed up entirely in the shadow 
of the house. 

“You promised to wake me!” gasped Pocket, 
almost speechless. “You’ve broken your word, 
sir!” 

“Only in your own interest,” replied the other 
calmly. 

“I believe you were waiting for me to wake— 
to catch my soul, or some rot!” cried the boy, 
with bitter rudeness; but he looked in vain for the 
stereoscopic or any other sort of camera, and Dr. 
Baumgartner only shrugged his shoulders as he 
opened an evening paper. 

“ I apologize for saying that,” the boy resumed, 
with a dignity that sounded near to tears. “I 
80 


An Awakening 

know you meant it for the best—to make up for 
my bad night—you’ve been very kind to me, I 
know! But I was due in Welbeck Street at twelve 
o’clock, and now I shall have to bolt to catch the 
six-thirty from St. Pancras.” 

“You won’t catch the six-thirty from St. Pan¬ 
cras,” replied Baumgartner, scarcely looking up 
from his paper. 

“I will unless I’m in some outlandish part of 
London!” cried Pocket, reflecting for the first 
time that he had no idea in what part of London 
he was. “I must catch it. It’s the last train 
back to school. I’ll get into an awful row if I 
don’t!” 

“You’ll get into a worse one if you do,” rejoined 
the doctor, looking over his paper, and not unfeel¬ 
ingly, at the boy. 

“What about?” 

Pocket held his breath instinctively as their eyes 
met. Baumgartner answered with increased com¬ 
passion and restraint, a gray look on his gray face: 

“Something that happened this morning. I 
fear you will be wanted here in town about it.” 

“Do tell me what, sir!” 

“Can you face things, my young fellow?” 

“Is it about my people—my mother?” the boy 
cried wildly, at her funeral in a flash. 

8l 


The Camera Fiend 


“No—yourself.” 

“Then I can!” 

The doctor overcame his final hesitation. 

“Do you remember a man we left behind us 
on the grass ? ” 

“Perfectly; the grass looked as wet as it felt 
just now in my dream.” 

“Exactly. Didn’t it strike you as strange that 
he should be lying there in the wet grass?” 

“I thought he was drunk.” 

“He was dead!” 

Pocket was shocked; he was more than shocked, 
for he had never witnessed death before; but next 
moment the shock was uncontrollably mitigated 
by a sudden view of the tragic incident as yet 
another adventure of that adventurous night. No 
doubt one to retail in reverential tones, but a most 
thrilling adventure none the less. He only failed 
to see why it should affect him as much as the 
doctor suggested. True, he might be called as 
witness at the inquest; his very natural density 
was pierced with the awkward possibility of that. 
But then he had not even known the man was dead. 

Had the doctor ? 

Yes. 

Pocket wondered why he had not been told 
at the time, but asked another question first. 

82 


An Awakening 

“What did he die of?” 

“A bullet!” 

“Suicide?” 

“No” 

“Not murder?” 

“This paper says so.” 

“Does it say who did it?” 

“It cannot.” 

“ Can you ? ” 

“Yes!” 

“Tell me.” 

The doctor threw out both hands in a despair¬ 
ing gesture. 

“Have I to tell you outright, my young fellow, 
that you did it yourself?” 


83 


CHAPTER VII 


Blood-Guilty 

H IS overwhelming horror was not alleviated 
by a moment’s doubt. He marvelled rather 
that he had never guessed what he had done. 
The walking in his sleep, the shot that woke him, 
the first words of Dr. Baumgartner, his first swift 
action, and the warm pistol in his own uncon¬ 
scious hand: these burning memories spoke more 
eloquently than any words. They would hare told 
their own tale at once, if only he had known the 
man was dead. Why had he been deceived ? It 
was cruel, it was infamous, to have kept the truth 
from him for a single instant. Thus wildly did 
the stricken youth turn and rend his benefactor 
for the very benefaction of a day’s rest in igno¬ 
rance of his deed. 

The doctor defended himself firmly, frankly, 
with much patience and some cynicism. Pocket 
was reminded of the state he himself had been in 
at the time. He also might have been a dying 
man, he was assured, and could well believe on 
84 


Blood-Guilty 

looking back. Baumgartner had actually opened 
his lips to tell him the truth, but had checked 
himself in sheer humanity. Again the boy could 
confirm the outward detail out of his own recol¬ 
lection. To have told him later in the morning, 
the doctor went on to say, with an emphasis not 
immediately understood, could have undone noth¬ 
ing. He acknowledged a grave responsibility, but 
rightly or wrongly he had put the living before the 
dead. 

How had he known the man was dead ? Baum¬ 
gartner smiled at the question, He was not only 
a doctor, but an old soldier who had fought in one 
at least of the bloodiest battles in European his¬ 
tory. He had seen too many men fall shot through 
the heart to be mistaken for a moment; but in 
point of fact he had confirmed his conviction by 
brief examination while Pocket was fetching his 
things from behind the bush. Pocket pressed for 
earlier details with a morbid appetite which was 
not gratified without reluctance, and out of a 
laconic interchange the deed was gradually recon¬ 
structed with appealing verisimilitude. It was 
Baumgartner who had first caught sight of the 
somnambulist, treading warily like the blind, yet 
waving the revolver as he went, as though any 
moment he might let it off. The moment came 

85 


The Camera Fiend 


with a wretched reeling man who joined Baum¬ 
gartner on the path, and would not be warned. 
The poor man had raised a drunken shout and 
been shot point-blank through the heart. The 
doctor described him as leaping backward from 
the levelled barrel, then into the air and down in 
the dew upon his face. 

The boy buried his face and wept; but even 
in his anguish he now recalled the shout before 
the shot. The enforced description had been so 
vivid in the end that he beheld the scene as plainly 
as though he had been wide awake. Then he 
dwelt upon the dead man, looking nothing else 
as he now remembered him, and that sent him 
off at a final tangent. 

He cried, looking up with a shudder for all 
his tears, “What about that negative you smashed ? 
It was the poor dead man all the time! ,, 

“It was,” replied Baumgartner; “but it was 
never meant to be. I had you in focus when you 
fired. What I did was done instinctively, but 
with time to think I should have done just the 
same. You had given me the chance of a life¬ 
time, though nothing has come of it so far. And 
that was another reason for saving you, ill as you 
were, from the immediate consequences of an 
innocent act.” 


86 


Blood-Guilty 

Pocket was passionately honest, as his worst 
friends knew; he had an instinctive admiration 
for downright honesty in another. His young soul 
was torn with grief and pity for the dead; he was 
already haunted by the inevitable and complex, 
consequences of his fatal misadventure, and yet 
he could dimly appreciate the candid declaration 
of one who had attempted to turn that tragedy 
to instantaneous and inconceivable account. It 
was the mistaken kindness to himself that he still 
found most difficult to forgive. 

“It’s got to come out,” he groaned; “this will 
make it all the worse.” 

“You mean the delay ?” 

“Yes! Who’s to tell them I didn’t do it on pur¬ 
pose, and run away, and then think better of it ?” 

Baumgartner smiled. 

“Surely I am,” said he; but his smile went out 
with the words. “If only they believe me!” he 
added as though it was a new idea to him. 

It was a terrifying one to Pocket. 

“Why shouldn’t they?” was his broken ex¬ 
clamation. 

“I don’t know. I never thought of it before. 
But what can I swear to, after all ? I can swear 
you shot a man, but I can’t swear you shot him 
in your sleep!” 


8 7 


The Camera Fiend 


“You said you saw I did!” 

“So I did, my young fellow,” replied the doctor, 
with a kinder smile; “at least I can swear that 
you were walking with your eyes shut, and I 
thought you were walking in your sleep. It’s 
not quite the same thing. It is near it. But we 
are talking about my evidence on oath in a court 
of justice.” 

“Shall I be tried?” asked the school-boy in a 
hoarse whisper. 

“Perhaps only by the magistrate,” replied the 
other soothingly; “let us hope it will stop at that.” 

“But it must, it must!” cried Pocket wildly. 
“Pm absolutely innocent! You said so yourself 
a minute ago; you’ve only to swear it as a doctor! 
They can’t do anything to me—they can’t 
possibly!” 

The doctor stood looking into the sunless garden 
with a troubled face. 

“Dr. Baumgartner!” 

“Yes, my young fellow?” 

“They can’t do anything to me, can they?” 

Baumgartner returned to the fireside with his 
foreign shrug. 

“It depends what you call anything,” said he. 
“They cannot hang you; after what I should 
certainly have to say I doubt if they could even 
88 


Blood-Guilty 

detain you in custody. But you would only be 
released on bail; the case would be sent for trial; 
it would get into every paper in England; your 
family could not stop it, your school-fellows would 
devour it, you would find it difficult to live down 
both at home and at school. In years to come it 
will mean at best a certain smile at your expense! 
That is what they can do to you,” concluded the 
doctor apologetically. “You asked me to tell you. 
It is better to be candid. I hoped you would bear 
it like a man.” 

Pocket was not even bearing it like a manly 
boy; he had flung himself back into the big chair, 
and broken down for the first time utterly. One 
name became articulate through his sobs. “My 
mother!” he moaned. “It’ll kill her! I know 
it will! Oh, that I should live to kill my mother 
too!” 

“Mothers have more lives than that; they have 
more than most people,” remarked Baumgartner 
sardonically. 

“You don’t understand! She has had a fright¬ 
ful illness; bad news of any kind has to be kept 
from her, and can you imagine worse news than 
this? She mustn’t hear it!” cried the boy, leap¬ 
ing to his feet with streaming eyes. <l For God’s 
sake, sir, help me to hush it up!” 

89 


The Camera Fiend 


“It's in the papers already,” replied Baum¬ 
gartner, with a forbearing shrug. 

“But my part in it!” 

“You said it had got to come out.” 

“I didn’t realize all it meant—to her!” 

“I thought you meant to make a clean breast 
of it?” 

“So I did; but now I don’t!” cried Pocket 
vehemently. “Now I would give my own life, 
cheerfully, rather than let her know what I’ve 
done—than drag them all through that!” 

“Do you mean what you say ?” 

Baumgartner appeared to be forming some 
conditional intention. 

“Every syllable!” said Pocket. 

“Because, you know,” explained the doctor, “it 
is a case of now or never so far as going to Scotland 
Yard is concerned.” 

“Then it’s never!” 

“I must put it plainly to you. It’s not too late 
to do whatever you decide, but you must decide 
now. I would still go with you to Scotland Yard, 
and the chances are that they would still accept 
the true story of to-day. I have told you what I 
believe to be the worst that can happen to you; 
it may be that rather more may happen to me 
for harboring you all day as I have done. I 
90 


Blood-Guilty 

hope not, but I took the law into my own hands, 
and I am prepared to abide by the law if you so 
decide this minute.” 

“I have decided.” 

“Mind you, it would mean putting yourself 
unreservedly in my hands, at any rate for the 
present,” said Baumgartner impressively. “Better 
come to Scotland Yard this minute than go back 
to school and blab about the whole thing there!” 

“I shouldn’t do that.” 

“I’m not so sure,” replied the acute doctor. 
“I believe I know you better than you know 
yourself; one learns more of a person in an hour 
like this than in a whole humdrum lifetime. I 
believe you would find it very difficult not to tell 
somebody.” 

Pocket admitted it with a natural outburst of 
his leading quality. In truth no previous act or 
word of Baumgartner’s had inspired such confi¬ 
dence as this unerring piece of insight. It seemed 
to the boy a perfect miracle of discernment. He 
was not old enough to know that what he would 
have done, in his weakness, most grown-up men 
and women of his temperament would have done 
in theirs. 

“Remember,” resumed the doctor, “you would 
have the whole of to-day to account for; it’s not as 
9i 


The Camera Fiend 


though you wouldn’t have some very awkward 
questions to answer the moment you got back to 
school.” 

And again the lad marvelled at this intuition 
into public-school conditions on the part of one 
who could have no first-hand knowledge of those 
insular institutions. But this fresh display of 
understanding only confirmed him in his re¬ 
solve. 

“I trust you, sir,” said he; “haven’t you done 
enough for me to make me ? I put myself, as you 
say, absolutely in your hands; and I’m grateful to 
you for all you’ve done and whatever you mean 
to do!” 

“Even though it comes to hiding with us here 
in London ? ” 

“No matter what it comes to,” cried Pocket, 
strangely exalted now, “so long as my people 
never know!” 

“They may think you dead.” 

He thought of saying that he wished he was; 
but it would not have been true; even then it 
would have been a lie, and Pocket was not the 
boy to tell one if he knew it. 

“That would be better than knowing what I 
have done,” was what he said; and in his exalta* 
ation he believed no less. 


92 


Blood-Guilty 

“You quite see that you are taking a step which 
must be final ?” 

“It is final—absolutely—so far as I am con¬ 
cerned.” 

And it was meant to be in all good faith; the 
very fulness and fairness of the doctor’s warnings 
served but to strengthen that resolve. But Baum¬ 
gartner, as if to let well or ill alone, dropped the 
matter with a clinching shrug; and presently he 
left his visitor, less wisely, to brood it alone. 

Pocket was a dab at brooding! That is the 
worst of your conscientious ass; he takes his 
decision like a man; he means to stick to it 
like a sportsman; but he cannot help wondering 
whether he has decided for the best, and what 
would have happened if he had decided other¬ 
wise, and what his world will say about him as 
it is. 

This one went much further in the unique stress 
of his extraordinary position. He pictured his 
people dressing for dinner at home; he pictured 
his form sitting down to private-work in his form- 
master’s hall; there was no end to his mental 
pictures, for they included one of himself on the 
scaffold in the broad-arrows of the little old wax- 
work at Madame Tussaud’s! He could not help 
himself; his mind was crumbling with his dread- 
93 


The Camera Fiend 


ful deed and its awful possibilities. Now his heart 
bled honestly for the poor dead man, now for 
his own mother and sister, and now not less 
freely for himself. He had been so innocent in 
the whole matter; he had only been an innocent 
and rather sporting fool. And now one of these 
lives was ended by his hand, and all the rest 
would be darkened forever after! 

It was too great a burden for a boy to bear; 
but Pocket bore it far into the long June twilight, 
scarcely stirring in the big soft chair, yet never 
leaning back in it again. He sat hunchd up as 
though once more battling for breath, but curi¬ 
ously enough his bodily distress had flown before 
that of the mind. Pocket would thankfully have 
changed them back again, for his brain was as 
clear as his bronchial tubes, its capacity for suffer¬ 
ing undimmed by a single physical preoccupation. 
Between seven and eight the young lady of the 
house came in with candles and a kind of high- 
tea on a tray; she also brought a box of d’Auvergne 
cigarettes and the latest evening paper, which 
her uncle thought that Mr. Upton would like to 
see. That was how the girl addressed the boy, 
and the style always made him feel, and wish to 
seem, something of a man. But his present effort 
in that direction was sadly perfunctory: he almost 
94 


Blood-Guilty 

ejected little Miss Platts in his eagerness to shut 
the door on her and see the news. 

It was neither unimportant nor at first sight 
reassuring. The dead man had been identified 
by the police, who knew him of old, and were 
reported as hopeful of obtaining a clew through 
his identity. The clew was the point that stuck 
like a burr in the boyish brain; his idea of a clew 
was one leading straight to himself; it took Dr. 
Baumgartner to explain the true value of the iden¬ 
tity clause, and bid the boy eat his meal. 

‘‘Trust the police!” said he. “They’re on a 
false scent already; they may try at that end till 
it turns their hair gray!” 

Pocket disliked this tone; he had begun to think 
almost as reverentially of his victim as of a dead 
member of his own family. It appeared thus 
early, however, that in life the defunct had been 
by no means worthy of respect. Rowton Houses 
had been his only home, except when his undis¬ 
tinguished offences got him into jail; the surrep¬ 
titious practices of the professional mendicant, his 
sole means of livelihood. So much was to be read 
between the few brief lines in the stop-press column 
of the latest evening paper. Again it required 
Baumgartner to extract comfort from such items. 

“At all events,” said he, “you cannot reproach 

95 


The Camera Fiend 


yourself with the destruction of a valuable life! 
The man was evidently the worthless creature 
that he looked. You talk about your undesirable 
aliens, but here in England you breed undesir¬ 
ables enough to manure the world! It’s a public 
service to reduce their number.” 

This pitch of nauseous cynicism had not been 
reached at a bound; the doctor had been working 
up to it all the evening, and this was the climax 
of his cold-blooded consolation as the school-boy 
mechanically undressed himself for bed. His host 
had accompanied him up two pairs of stairs, carry¬ 
ing candles, and his meerschaum pipe in aromatic 
blast. Pocket felt a new chill through his veins, 
but he was not revolted as he would have been at 
first. This extraordinary man had shown him 
still more extraordinary kindness; the die was cast 
for them to stand or fall together; and there was 
something about the gaunt old visionary, a con¬ 
fidential candor, a dry intellectual plausibility, 
which could not but stimulate respect for his un- 
godliest views. Whether they really were his views 
or only a tortuous attempt at comfort, the sym¬ 
pathy underlying their expression was undoubted 
and indubitable. But the doctor spoke as though 
he meant every word, and the boy only longed to 
agree with him: his conscientious failure to do so 
96 


Blood-Guilty 

declared itself in a series of incoherent expostu¬ 
lations to which Baumgartner himself gave artic¬ 
ulate shape in order to demolish them in the next 
breath. 

“You say his life was as much to him as yours 
to you? Is that it, my young fellow ?” 

Pocket acknowledged the interpretation, and 
watched the Turk’s head wreathed in cool blue 
clouds. 

“You might as well compare withered weed 
with budding flower!” cried the poetic doctor. 
“You have an honorable life before you; he had 
a disreputable one behind him. You were bred 
and nurtured in the lap of luxury; he finds it for 
the first time in his-” 

But here even Baumgartner broke off abruptly. 
The boy was writhing in his bed; the man sat 
down on the end of it. 

“You do such poor devils a service,” said he, 
“in sending them to a world that cannot use them 
worse than this one. They are better under the 
ground than lying on it drenched and drunk!” 

“It was a human life,” groaned the boy, shutting 
his eyes in pain. 

“Human life!” cried Baumgartner, leaping to 
his feet, his huge shadow guying him on the ceil¬ 
ing. “What is this human life, and who are you 
97 


The Camera Fiend 


and I that we set such store by it? The great 
men of this world never did; it’s only the little 
people and the young who pule and whine about 
human life. The ancient Roman sacrificed his 
weaklings as on an altar; there are some of us in 
these days who would prescribe a Tarpeian Rock 
for modern decadence. So much in pious paren¬ 
thesis! Napoleon thought nothing of your human 
life. Von Moltke, Bismarck, and our Staff in 
Germany thought as little of it as Napoleon; the 
Empire of my countrymen was founded on a 
proper appreciation of the infinitesimal value of 
human life, and your British Empire will be lost 
through exaggerating its importance. Blood and 
Iron were our watchwords; they’re on the tip of 
every Fleet Street pen to-day, but I speak of what 
I know. I’ve heard the Iron shriek without ceas¬ 
ing, like the wind, and I’ve felt the Blood like spray 
from a hot spring! I fought at Gravelotte; as a 
public-school boy you probably never heard the 
name before this minute. I fought in the Prussian 
Guard. I saw you looking at the pictures down¬ 
stairs. I was in that charge across those hellish 
ridges. Over two thousand of us fell dead in half 
an hour, but we gained the victory. More Ger¬ 
mans were killed that day—that sweltering August 
afternoon—than English in your whole South 


Blood-Guilty 

African War that took you years! The flower of 
Germany fell at Gravelotte; that was human life 
with a vengeance! But an empire rose out of my 
comrades’ ashes. And that’s all it’s for, this hu¬ 
man life of yours: for the master-builders to lay 
out in their wisdom on the upward road.” 

The school-boy was carried away. In the sud¬ 
den eloquence of this strange outburst, with its 
poetic frenzy, its ruthless idealism, its wild blood¬ 
thirsty nobility, the youthful listener lost sight 
of its irrelevancy, or rather it was the irrelevant 
features that flared up first in his brain. It was 
a childish question, but here was a very child, 
and he could not help asking the fierce old soldier 
whether he had escaped without a wound. 

“Without a scratch,” was the reply. “I come 
home. I leave the army. I ally my human life 
with one that is all but divine. My Queen is 
struck down dead at my side within a year. And 
you expect me to pity the veriest pawn in the 
game! ” 

The boy was never to forget these bitter speeches 
altogether; there was not a single sentence of 
them that he failed to recall at one time or another 
word for word. He would see a wild arm waving, 
wisps of smoke from a waving pipe, a core of 
nicotine in a curve of amber, and the Turk’s face 
99 


The Camera Fiend 

glistening in its heat like that of the hard old man 
himself. He would hear the cynical and scornful 
voice softening in a breath to the simple, tender, 
and domestic humanity of his race. The voice and 
the face were with him throughout that night of 
his own manifold misery; but the time had not 
come for so young a boy to realize that Dr. Baum¬ 
gartner had begun to say one thing, and been car¬ 
ried away like his listener. 


ioo 


CHAPTER VIII 

Points of View 


O N the following morning, the ominous Friday 
of this disastrous week, there was a letter 
for Mr. Upton on the breakfast-table down in 
Leicestershire. This circumstance was not so 
usual as it sounds, because Mr. Upton conducted 
all his correspondence from his office at the works. 
If you simply put the name of the village, as he 
did on his stationery, to the works it went; it was 
necessary to direct your letter to the hall if you 
wished it to be delivered there; and few there were 
who had anything to say to Mr. Upton, on paper, 
unless it was on business too. His youngest son, 
however, had furnished the more impressive ad¬ 
dress to Dr. Bompas, whose hurried hand it was 
that dealt the first blow. 

It so happened that a letter from Dr. Bompas 
had been expected; this made the letter he wrote 
especially upsetting, and for the following reason. 
Mrs. Upton had been so shaken by her vivid 
dream on the Thursday morning that her husband 
had telegraphed to Bompas, somewhat against 
IOI 


The Camera Fiend 


his own judgment, to know how he found their 
son. The reply had been: “Better expecting him 
again to-day will write ,, —which prepared the fam¬ 
ily for still more reassuring accounts in the morn¬ 
ing. Lettice felt relieved as the original discov¬ 
erer of Dr Bompas. Horace found his views 
confirmed as to the systematic exaggeration of a 
touch of asthma, and Fred was only prevented by 
absence from entirely agreeing with Horace. Mr. 
Upton thought no more about the matter. But 
poor Mrs. Upton lay upstairs looking forward to 
a letter which it was quite impossible to show her 
now that it had come. 

Mr. Upton read it more than once without a 
word; and it was not his way to keep a family 
matter to himself at his own table; but on this 
occasion he triumphed over temperament with an 
extraordinary instinct for what was in the air. 

“The most infernal letter I ever had in my life!” 
was his only comment as he thrust it in his pocket 
out of sight. Lettice, however, might have seen 
that her father was far more distressed than angry, 
had not Horace promptly angered him by saying 
he was not surprised. The young fellow’s face 
and the old one’s neck were redder before the last 
was heard of that remark. A garbled paraphrase 
of the letter was eventually vouchsafed; the boy 
102 


Points of View 

had made very little improvement, and was not 
likely to make more while he remained at a school 
where he was allowed to use any remedy he liked; 
in fact, until he was taken away from school, and 
placed under his own immediate control in town, 
Dr. Bompas declined to persevere with the case. 

“Blighter!” said Horace impartially, as though 
now there were two of them. Such was, in fact, 
the sum of his observations to Lettice when their 
father had taken himself and his letter upstairs. 
Young Tony was not “playing the game”; but 
then he never did play it to the expert satisfaction 
of Fred and Horace. 

Upstairs the husband gave a more elaborate 
version of his letter, and told a lie. He said he 
had destroyed the letter in his indignation. He 
had destroyed it, but solely to escape any question 
of his showing it to his wife. He said a happier 
thing by chance; he said that for two pins he would 
motor over to the school and see for himself how 
the boy really was; then perhaps he would be in 
a position to consider the entreaty which Mrs. 
Upton added to the specialist’s demand, that his 
patient should be placed under his eye in town. 
Mr. Upton went so far, however, without much 
immediate intention of taking so strong a measure. 

He wished to discuss the matter with Horace; 

I0 3 


The Camera Fiend 


he might be quite justified in his fears. He was 
sorry he had let them lead to words with his eldest 
son. There were aspects of the case, as it pre¬ 
sented itself to his mind, which he could hardly 
thresh out with Lettice, and her mother must not 
know of his anxiety on any account. Horace, 
however, had gone off earlier than usual in his 
dudgeon. Mr. Upton was not long in following 
him to the works. 

It was a charming garden that he passed through 
on his way; it charmed its owner all the more from 
his having made it himself out of a few rolling 
meadows. The rhododendrons were at the climax 
of their June glory. The new red gravel (his own 
coloring to a shade) appealed to an eye which had 
never looked longer than necessary in the glass. 
Lawn-tennis courts were marked out snowily on 
a shaven lawn; the only eyesore the good man en¬ 
countered was poor Pocket’s snob-wickets painted 
on a buttress in the back premises; his own belch¬ 
ing blast-furnaces, corroding and defiling acres 
and acres within a few hundred yards of his gar¬ 
den wall, were but another form of beauty to the 
sturdy Briton who had made them too. 

Horace was called into the private office and 
speedily propitiated. “I was more anxious than 
I could tell you at the time,” his father said; “the 
104 


Points of View 

fact is, I concealed half the fellow’s letter on ac¬ 
count of Lettice. But it’s a man’s matter, and 
you ought to know.” 

Of course the letter had stated that the erratic 
patient had failed to keep his appointment on the 
morning of writing; but if it had drawn the line 
of information there, it is highly improbable that 
Mr. Upton would have exercised so wise a dis¬ 
cretion at table and in his wife’s room. It now 
appeared that as a busy professional man the out¬ 
spoken Bompas had gone far out of his way to 
play Mahomet to his patient’s mountain. Tony 
had told him where he hoped to stay in London, 
which Bompas particularly wished to know on ac¬ 
count of some special prescription the boy was to 
try that night. On his failure to appear at the ap¬ 
pointed time, the doctor had telephoned to the 
address in question, only to learn that the boy had 
not stayed there at all. He had been given an¬ 
other address with the same result, except that 
from the second house he gathered that the young 
gentleman had gone on to some hotel. Horace 
was left to imagine a professional opinion of such 
proceedings, and asked for his own on the facts 
as a man of the world. 

“Exactly like young Tony!” quoth Horace, 
never afraid to say what he thought. 

105 


The Camera Fiend 


“What! Like a lad of sixteen to go and put 
up at some hotel ?” 

“Like Tony/’ repeated Horace significantly. 
“Trust him to do what nobody else ever did.” 

“ But how could Spearman give him the 
chance ?” 

“Heaven knows! Fred and I never got it.” 

“ I thought he was to stay at Coverley’s ? ” 

“So I heard.” 

“I don’t like it! It’s all wrong at his age,” 
said Mr. Upton. He had his notions of life and 
its temptations, and he was blunt enough with 
his elder sons, yet it was not without some hesita¬ 
tion that he added: “You don’t think there’s 
any question of bad company, do you ?” 

And though Horace had “no use for” his so- 
called pocket edition, he answered without any 
hesitation at all: “Not for a moment, from what I 
know of Tony.” 

Mr. Upton was sorry he had said so much. 
He excused himself by mentioning his wife’s dream, 
now family property, which had been on his mind 
all this time. Horace, however, had no hesitation 
in informing him that nobody nowadays believed 
in dreams. 

“Well, I never have, certainly,” said Mr. Upton. 
“But what can it be?’* 

106 


Points of View 


“He probably went up to Lord’s and forgot all 
about his doctor.” 

“ I hope not! You’re too down on him, Horace.” 

“If there was nobody to put him up it was the 
game to go back to school.” 

“ But he’s said to have gone to some hotel.” 

“I don’t suppose he did,” said Horace. “I 
expect he got back somehow.” 

The question was still under discussion when 
a telegram from Mr. Spearman settled it. Where 
was Tony ? He had not returned when due the 
day before, and his friends in London wired that 
they knew nothing about him. 

“What friends?” cried Mr. Upton in a fury. 
“Why the devil couldn’t Spearman give their 
names or Bompas the addresses he talked about ?” 

Horace could only think of Mr. Coverley or 
“that Knaggs crowd.” Neither he nor Fred had 
been at Coverley’s school, and young Tony’s 
friends were by no means theirs. 

Mr. Upton thought Lettice would know, and 
was going to speak to her on the telephone when 
Horace reminded him of his own remark about 
its being “a man’s matter”; it was beginning to 
look, even to Horace, like a serious one as well, 
and in his opinion it was much better that neither 
his mother nor his sister should know anything at 
107 


The Camera Fiend 


all about it before it was absolutely necessary. Hor¬ 
ace now quoted his mother’s dream as the devil 
did Scripture, but adduced sounder arguments be¬ 
sides; he was speaking quite nicely of them both, 
for instance, when he declared that Lettice was 
wrapped up in Tony, and would be beside herself 
if she thought any evil had overtaken him. It 
would be simply impossible for her to hide her 
anxiety from the mother on whom she also waited 
hand and foot. Mr. Upton disagreed a little there; 
he had good reason to believe in Lettice’s power 
of suppressing her own feelings; but for her own 
sake, and particularly in view of that discredited 
dream, he now decided to keep his daughter in the 
dark as long as his wife. It was his first decision; 
his next was to motor over to the school, as he had 
fortunately told his wife he might, and have a 
word with Mr. Spearman, who deserved hanging 
for the whole thing! The mischief was done, 
however, and it was now a matter in which home 
and school authorities must act together. A clerk 
was instructed to telephone to the garage for the 
car to come straight to the works. And the iron¬ 
master stood waiting at his office window in a 
fever of anxiety. 

The grimy scene on which he looked had a 
constant charm for him, and yet to-day it almost 
108 


Points of View 

added to the bitterness of his heart. His was the 
brain that had conceived those broad effects of 
smoke and flame, and blackened faces lit by the 
light of molten metal; his the strong hand and the 
stout heart which had brought his conception into 
being. Those were his trucks bringing in his ore 
from his mines; that was his consequential little 
locomotive fussing in front of them. His men, 
dwellers in his cottages on the brow of that hill, 
which was also his, happened to be tapping one 
of his furnaces at the moment; that was his pig- 
iron running out into the moulds as magically as 
an electric advertisement writes itself upon the 
London sky at night. The sense of possession 
is the foible of many who have won all they have; 
the ironmaster almost looked upon the hot air 
dancing over the white-hot bars as his too. The 
whole sulphurous prospect, once a green pasture, 
had long been his to all intents and purposes, and 
no second soul would ever take his pride in it; to 
his children it would never be more than the means 
of livelihood; and how had it repaid even him for 
a life’s devotion ? With a house of sorrow in the 
next valley! With a stricken wife, and sons whose 
right hands kept their cunning for the cricket 
field, and one of whom the very thought had be¬ 
come a sudden madness! 

109 


The Camera Fiend 


Yet he could think of nothing else, except his 
wife, even in the great green car that whisked him 
westward in a dancing cloud of dust; for he did 
not drive himself, and the rush through the iced 
fragrance of the summer’s day was a mental stim¬ 
ulant that did its work only too well. Now it 
recalled the ailing infancy of the missing boy— 
bronchitis it had been in the early stages—and 
how his mother had taken him to Hastings three 
successive winters, and wrapped him up far too 
much. Old family jokes cropped up in a new 
light, dimming the eyes without an instant’s warn¬ 
ing. On one of those flittings south the solicitous 
mother had placed the uncomplaining child on 
a foot-warmer, and forgotten him until a cascade 
of perspiration apprised her of the effect: poor Mr. 
Upton had never thought of the incident without 
laughter, until to-day. Without doubt she had 
coddled him, and all for this, and she herself too 
ill to hear a word about it! 

His mind harked back to his wife. In her 
sad case there was no uncertainty. He thought 
of thirty years ago when he had seen her first. 
There had been drama and color in their meeting; 
the most celebrated of the neighboring packs had 
run a fox to earth on his works, indeed in his very 
slag heap! The author of cancerous furnaces in 


no 


Points of View 

the green heart of a grass country had never been 
a popular personage with the hunting folk; but 
he was master of the situation that memorable 
day. It was his terrier that went into the slag- 
heap like a ferret, and came out bloody with a 
moribund fox; his pocket-knife that shore through 
the brush, his hand that presented it across the 
wall to the only young lady in at the death. The 
men in pink looking over, the hunt servants with 
their work cut out on the other side, the tongue 
of molten slag sticking out of the furnace mouth— 
the momentary contact of the industrial and the 
sporting world—it was that strange and yet sig¬ 
nificant scene which had first endeared its dingy 
setting to the ironmaster’s heart. But he had 
made the contact permanent by falling in love 
with the young lady of the brush and marrying 
her under all the guns of her countified kith and 
kin. And now she was a stricken invalid, and 
their youngest-born was God knew where! 

Of course there were no tidings of him at the 
school, where the now distracted father spent a 
more explosive hour than he cared to think about 
as he flew on to town in the car. He was afraid 
he had been very rude to Mr. Spearman; but 
then Spearman had been rash enough to repudiate 
his obvious responsibility in the matter. It was 
hi 


The Camera Fiend 


not his fault that the boy went up to town so often 
to see his doctor and stay the night. He had his 
own opinion of that arrangement, but it had be¬ 
come his business to see it carried out. Mr. Up¬ 
ton got in a sharp thrust here, to which the house¬ 
master retorted that if a boy of seventeen could 
not be trusted to keep his Word, he should like 
to know who could! Tony had promised him 
faithfully to return that same night, failing friends 
whom he had mentioned as certain to put him 
up; their names Mr. Upton was able to demand 
at last as though they were so much blood; and 
he could not have cursed them more freely if 
Spearman had been a layman like himself. But 
that was all the information forthcoming from 
this quarter; for, happening to ask what the head¬ 
master thought of the affair, Mr. Upton was 
calmly informed that it had still to reach his ears; 
at which he stared, and then merely remarked 
that he was not surprised, but in such a tone 
that Spearman sprang up and led him straight 
into the presence. 

Now the Benevolent Despot of this particular 
seat of learning was an astute pedagogue who 
could handle men as well as boys. He explained 
to Mr. Upton that the safe-keeping of the unit 
was the house-master’s concern, but agreed it was 
112 


Points of View 

time that he himself was made acquainted with 
the present case. He took it as seriously, too, 
as Mr. Upton could have wished, but quite as 
frankly from his own point of view as his two 
visitors did from each of theirs. He had no doubt 
the boy would turn up, but when he did it would 
be necessary for him to give a satisfactory account 
of his proceedings before he could be received 
back into the school. 

“Bother the school!” cried Mr. Upton, diluting 
the anathema with difficulty. “Let me find my 
lad alive and well; then you can do what you like.” 

“But how do you propose to find him?” in¬ 
quired the head-master, with only a dry smile 
(which disappointed Spearman) by way of re¬ 
joinder. 

“First I shall have a word with these infernal 
people who, on their own showing, refused the 
boy a bed. I’ll give them a bit of my mind, I 
promise you! Then there’s the hotel they seem 
to have driven him to; it may be the one we always 
stay at, or one they’ve recommended. If I can’t 
hear anything of him there, I suppose there’ll be 
nothing for it but to call in the police.” 

“My dear sir,” exclaimed the head-master,“you 
may as well call in the public at once! It will be 
in the papers before you know where you are; 
n 3 


The Camera Fiend 


and that, I need hardly point out to you, is as un¬ 
desirable from our point of view as I should have 
thought it would be from yours/’ 

“It’s more so from mine!” cried Mr. Upton, 
in fresh alarm and indignation. “You think 
about your school. I think about my wife and 
boy; it might kill her to hear about this before 
he’s found. But if I don’t go to the police, who 
am I to go to ? ” 

The head-master leant back in his chair, and 
joined his finger-tips judicially. 

“There was a man we had down here to in¬ 
vestigate an extraordinary case of dishonesty, in 
which I was actually threatened with legal proceed¬ 
ings on behalf of a certain boy. But this man 
Thrush came down and solved the mystery within 
twenty-four hours, and saved the school a public 
scandal.” 

“He may save you another,” said Mr. Upton, 
“if he can find my boy. What did you say the 
name was ?” 

“Thrush—Eugene Thrush—quite a remarkable 
man, and, I think, a gentleman,” said the head¬ 
master impressively. Further particulars, includ¬ 
ing an address in Glasshouse Street, were readily 
supplied from an advertisement in that day’s 
Times , in which Mr. Thrush was described as 
114 


Points of View 


an “inquiry agent,” capable alike of “delicate 
investigations” and “confidential negotiations.” 

That was the very man for Mr. Upton, as he 
himself agreed. And he departed both on speak¬ 
ing terms with Mr. Spearman, who said a final 
word for his own behavior in the matter, and 
grimly at one with the head-master on the impor¬ 
tance of keeping it out of the papers. 


”5 


CHAPTER IX 

Mr. Eugene Thrush 

T HE remarkable Mr. Thrush was a duly quali¬ 
fied solicitor, who had never been the man 
for that orderly and circumscribed profession. 
The tide of events which had turned his talents 
into their present channel was known to but few 
of his many boon companions, and much non¬ 
sense was talked about him and his first career. 
It was not the case (as anybody might have ascer¬ 
tained) that he had been struck off the rolls in 
connection with the first great scandal in which 
he was professionally concerned. Nor was there 
much more truth in the report that he drank, 
in the ordinary interpretation of the term. 

It is true, however, that Mr. Thrush had a tall 
tumbler on his dressing-table, to help him shave 
for the evening of that fateful Friday. He was 
dressing for an early dinner before a first night. 
His dressing-room, in which he also slept in Spar¬ 
tan simplicity, was the original powder-closet of 
116 


Mr. Eugene Thrush 

the panelled library out of which it led. There 
was a third room in which his man Mullins pre¬ 
pared breakfast and spent the day. But the whole 
was a glorified garret, at the top of such stairs as 
might have sent a nervous client back for an 
escort. 

Mullins, with the expression of an undertaker’s 
mute (a calling he had followed in his day), was 
laying out his master’s clothes as mournfully as 
though his master were in them, instead of chat- 
ting genially as he shaved. 

“I’m sorry to have missed your evidence, Mul¬ 
lins, but if we go into this case it’s no use letting 
the police smell the competitive rat too soon. 
Inquests are not in my line, and they’d have 
wondered what the devil I was doing there, espe¬ 
cially as you refrained from saying you were in 
my service.” 

“I had no call, sir.” 

“Quite right, Mullins! An ideal witness, I can 
see you were. So you’d only to describe the 
finding of the body?” 

“That was all, sir.” 

“And your description was really largely 
founded on fact?” 

Mullins stood like a funereal grenadier at his 
gentleman’s shaving elbow. “I told the truth* 


The Camera Fiend 

sir, and nothing but the truth/’ said he, with 
sombre dignity. 

“ But not the whole truth, eh, Mullins ? What 
about the little souvenirs you showed me yester¬ 
day?” 

“There was no call to name them either, sir. 
The cheroot-end I must have picked up a hundred 
yards away, and even the medicine cork wasn’t 
on the actual scene of the murder.” 

“That’s all right, Mullins. I don’t see what 
they could possibly have to do with it, myself; 
and really, but for the fluke of your being the one 
to find the body, and picking the first-fruits for 
what they’re worth, it’s the last kind of case that 
I should dream of touching with a ten-foot pole. 
By the way, I suppose they won’t require you at 
the adjourned inquest?” 

“They may not require me, sir, but I should 
like to attend, if quite convenient,” replied Mullins 
deferentially. “The police were very stingy with 
their evidence to-day; they’ve still to produce the 
fatal bullet, and I should like a sight of that, sir.” 

Mr. Thrush did not continue the conversation, 
possibly because he took as little real interest as 
he professed in the case which was being thrust 
upon him, but more obviously owing to the neces¬ 
sary care in shaving the corners of a delightfully 
118 


Mr. Eugene Thrush 

long and mobile mouth. Indeed, the whole face 
emerging from the lather, as a cast from its clay, 
would have delighted any eye but its own. It was 
fat and flabby as the rest of Eugene Thrush; there 
was quite a collection of chins to shave; and yet 
anybody but himself must have recognized the 
invincible freshness of complexion, the happy pene¬ 
tration of every glance, as an earnest of inexhaust¬ 
ible possibilities beneath the burden of the flesh. 
Great round spectacles, through which he stared 
like a wise fish in an aquarium, were caught pre¬ 
cariously on a button of a nose which in itself 
might have prevented the superficial observer from 
taking him any more seriously than he took him¬ 
self. • 

Mr. Upton, who arrived before Thrush was 
visible, was an essentially superficial and anti¬ 
pathetic observer of unfamiliar types; and being 
badly impressed by the forbidding staircase, he 
had determined on the landing to sound his man 
before trusting him. In the rank undergrowth 
of his prejudices there was no more luxuriant 
weed than an innate abhorrence of London and 
all Londoners, which neither the cause of his visit 
nor the murky mien of Mullins was calculated 
to abate. The library of books in solid bindings, 
many of them legal tomes, was the first reassuring 
119 


The Camera Fiend 


feature; another was the large desk, made busi¬ 
ness-like with pigeon-holes and a telephone; but 
Mr. Upton was only beginning to recover con¬ 
fidence when Eugene Thrush shook it sadly at 
his first entry. 

It might have been by his face, or his fat, or 
his evening clothes seen from the motorist’s dusty 
tweeds, almost as much as by the misplaced jovi¬ 
ality with which Thrush exclaimed: “I’m sorry 
to have kept you waiting, sir, and the worst of it 
is that I can’t let you keep me!” 

This touched a raw nerve in the ironmaster, as 
the kind of reception one had to come up to Lon¬ 
don to incur. “Then I’ll clear out!” said he, 
and would have been as good as his word but for 
its instantaneous effect. 

Thrush had pulled out a gold watch after a stare 
of kindly consternation. 

“I really am rather rushed,” said he; “but I 
can give you four minutes, if that’s any good to 
you.” 

Now, at first sight, before a word was spoken, 
Mr. Upton would have said four hours or four 
days of that boiled salmon in spectacles would 
have been no good to him; but the precise term 
of minutes, together with a seemlier but not less 
decisive manner, had already quickened the busi- 
120 


Mr. Eugene Thrush 

ness man’s respect for another whose time was 
valuable. This is by no means to say that Thrush 
had won him over in a breath. But the following 
interchange took place rapidly. 

“I understand you’re a detective, Mr. Thrush ?” 

“Hardly that, Mr.- I’ve left your card in 

the other room.” 

“Upton is my name, sir.” 

“I don’t aspire to the official designation, Mr. 
Upton; an inquiry agent is all I presume to call 
myself.” 

“But you do inquire into mysteries?” 

“I’ve dabbled in them.” 

“As an amateur?” 

“A paid amateur, I fear.” 

“I come on a serious matter, Mr. Thrush— a 
very serious matter to me!” 

“ Pardon me if I seem anything else for a mo¬ 
ment; as it happens, you catch me dabbling, or 
rather meddling, in a serious case which is none 
of my business, but strictly a matter for the police, 
only it happens to have come my way by a fluke. 
I am not a policeman, but a private inquisitor. 
If you want anything or anybody ferreted out, 
that’s my job and I should put it first.” 

“Mr. Thrush, that’s exactly what I do want, if 
only you can do it for me! I had reason to fear, 
121 


The Camera Fiend 


from what I heard this morning, that my youngest 
child, a boy of sixteen, had disappeared up here 
in London, or been decoyed away. And now 
there can be no doubt about it!” 

So, in about one of the allotted minutes, Thrush 
was trusted on grounds which Mr. Upton could 
not easily have explained; but the time was up 
before he had concluded a briefly circumstantial 
report of the facts within his knowledge. 

“When can I see you again ?” he asked abruptly 
of Thrush. 

“When ? What do you mean, Mr. Upton ?” 

“The four minutes must be more than up.” 

“Go on, my dear sir, and don’t throw good 
time after bad. I’m only dining with a man at 
his club. He can wait.” 

“Thank you, Mr. Thrush.” 

“More good time! How do you know the boy 
hasn’t turned up at school or at home while you’ve 
been fizzing in a cloud of dust?” 

“I was to have a wire at the hotel I always 
stop at; there’s nothing there; but the first thing 
they told me was that my boy had been for a bed 
which they couldn’t give him the night before 
last. I did let them have it! But it seems the 
manager was out, and his under-strappers had 
recommended other hotels; they’ve just been tele- 
122 


Mr. Eugene Thrush 

phoning to them all in turn, but at every one the 
poor boy seems to have fared the same. Then 
Tve been in communication with these infernal 
people in St. John’s Wood, and with the doctor, 
but none of them have heard anything. I thought 
Td like to do what I could before coming to you, 
Mr. Thrush, but that’s all I’ve done or know 
how to do. Something must have happened!” 

“ It begins to sound like it,” said Thrush gravely. 
“But there are happenings and happenings; it 
may be only a minor accident. One moment!” 

And he returned to the powder-closet of its 
modish day, where Mullins was still pursuing his 
ostensibly menial avocation. What the master 
said was inaudible in the library, but the man 
hurried out in front of him, and was heard clatter¬ 
ing down the evil stairs next minute. 

“In less than an hour,” explained Thrush, “he 
will be back with a list of the admissions at the 
principal hospitals for the last forty-eight hours. 
I don’t say there’s much in it; your boy had prob¬ 
ably some letter or other means of easier identifi¬ 
cation about him; but it’s worth trying.” 

“It is, indeed!” murmured Mr. Upton, much 
impressed. 

“And while he is trying it,” exclaimed Eugene 
Thrush, lighting up as with a really great idea, 
123 


The Camera Fiend 


“you’ll greatly oblige me by having a whisky-and- 
soda in the first place.” 

“No, thank you! I haven’t had a bite all day. 
It would fly to my head.” 

“But that’s its job; that’s where it’s meant to 
fly,” explained the convivial Mr. Thrush, prepar¬ 
ing the potion with practised hand. Baited with 
a biscuit it was eventually swallowed, and a flag¬ 
ging giant refreshed by his surrender. It made 
him like his new acquaintance too well to bear 
the thought of detaining him any more. 

“Go to your dinner, man, and let me waylay 
you later!” 

“Thank you, I prefer to keep you now I’ve got 
you, Mr. Upton! My man begins his round by going 
to tell my pal I can’t dine with him at all. Not a 
word, I beg! I’ll have a bite with you instead when 
Mullins gets back, and in a taxi that won’t be long.” 

“But do you think you can do anything?” 

The question floated in pathetic evidence on 
a flood of inarticulate thanks. 

“If you give me time, I hope so,” was the 
measured answer. “But the needle in the hay is 
nothing to the lost unit in London, and it will take 
time. I’m not a magazine detective, Mr. Upton; 
if you want a sixpenny solution for soft problems, 
don’t come to me!” 


124 


Mr. Eugene Thrush 

At an earlier stage the ironmaster would have 
raised his voice and repeated that this was a serious 
matter; even now he looked rather reproachfully 
at Eugene Thrush, who came back to business 
on the spot. 

“I haven’t asked you for a description of the 
boy, Mr. Upton, because it’s not much good if 
we’ve got to keep the matter to ourselves. But 
is there anything distinctive about him besides 
the asthma?” 

“Nothing; he was never an athlete, like my 
other boys.” 

“Come! I call that a distinction in itself,” said 
Mr. Thrush, smiling down his own unathletic 
waistcoat. “But, as a matter of fact, nothing 
could be better than the very complaint which no 
doubt unfits him for games.” 

“Nothing better, do you say?” 

“Emphatically, from my point of view. It’s 
harder to hide a man’s asthma than to hide the 
man himself.” 

“I never thought of that.” 

It was impossible to tell whether Thrush had 
thought of it before that moment. The round 
glasses were levelled at Mr. Upton with an inscru¬ 
table stare of the marine eyes behind them. 

“I suppose it has never affected his heart?” 
125 


The Camera Fiend 


he inquired nonchalantly; but the nonchalance 
was a thought too deliberate for paternal per¬ 
ceptions quickened as were those of Mr. Upton. 

“Is that why you sent round the hospitals, 
Mr. Thrush ?” 

“ It was one reason, but honestly not the chief.” 

“I certainly never thought of his heart!” 

“Nor do I think you need now, in the case of 
so young a boy,” said Thrush earnestly. “On 
the other hand, I shouldn’t be surprised if his 
asthma were to prove his best friend.” 

“It owes him something!” 

“Do you know what he does for it ?” 

“Yes, I do,” said Mr. Upton, remembering the 
annoying letter he seemed to have received some 
weeks before. “He smokes, against his doctor’s 
orders.” 

“Do you mean tobacco?” 

“No—some stuff for asthma.” 

“In cigarettes?” 

“Yes.” 

“Do you know the name?” 

“I have it here.” 

The offensive letter was not only produced, 
but offered for inspection after a precautionary 
glance. Thrush was on his feet to receive it in 
out-stretched hand. Already he looked extraor- 
126 


Mr. Eugene Thrush 

dinarily keen for his bulk, but the reading of the 
letter left him alive and alert to the last super¬ 
fluous ounce. 

“But this is magnificent!” he cried, with eyes 
as round as their glasses. 

“I confess I don’t see why.” 

“Cigarettes d’Auvergne!” 

“Some French rubbish.” 

“The boy has evidently been dependent on 
them ? ” 

“It looks like it.” 

“And this man Bompas made him give them 
all up ?” 

“So he has the impudence to say.” 

“Is it possible you don’t see the importance 
of all this?” 

Mr. Upton confessed incompetence unashamed. 

“I never heard of these cigarettes before; they’re 
an imported article; you can’t get them every¬ 
where, I’ll swear! Your boy has got to rely on 
them; he’s out of reach of the doctor who’s for¬ 
bidden them; he’ll try to get them somewhere! 
If he’s been trying in London, I’ll find out where 
before I’m twenty-four hours older!” 

“But how can you?” asked Mr. Upton, less 
impressed with the possibility than by this rapid 
if obvious piece of reasoning. 

127 


The Camera Fiend 


“A. V. M.!” replied Eugene Thrush with 
cryptic smile. 

“ Who on earth is he ?” 

“Nobody; it’s the principle on which I work.” 
“A. V. M.?” 

“Otherwise the old nursery game of Animal, 
Vegetable, or Mineral.” 

Again Mr. Upton had to prevent himself by 
main force from declaring it all no laughing 
matter; but his silence was almost bellicose. 

“You divide things into two,” explained Thrush, 
“and go on so dividing them until you come down 
to the indivisible unit which is the answer to the 
riddle. Animal or Vegetable ? Vegetable or Min¬ 
eral ? Northern or Southern Hemisphere ? Ah! 
I thought your childhood was not so very much 
longer ago than mine.” 

Mr. Upton had shrugged an impatient recog¬ 
nition of the game. 

“In this case it’s Chemists Who Do Sell D’Au¬ 
vergne Cigarettes and Chemists Who Don’t. Then 
—Chemists Who Do and Did Yesterday, and 
Chemists Who Do but Didn’t! But we can prob¬ 
ably improve on the old game by playing both 
rounds at once.” 

“I confess I don’t quite follow,” said Mr. Upton, 
“though there seems some method in the madness.” 

128 


Mr. Eugene Thrush 

“It’s all the method I’ve got,” rejoined Thrush 
frankly. “ But you shall see it working, for unless 
I’m much mistaken this is Mullins back sooner 
than I expected.” 

Mullins it was, and with the negative infor¬ 
mation expected and desired, though the profes¬ 
sional melancholy of his countenance might have 
been the precursor of the worst possible news. 
The hospitals on his rapid round had included 
Charing Cross, St. Thomas’s, St. George’s, and 
the Royal Free; but he had telephoned besides 
to St. Mary’s and St. Bartholomew’s. At none 
of these institutions had a young gentleman of the 
name of Upton, or of unknown name, been ad¬ 
mitted in the last forty-eight hours. Mullins, 
however, looked as sympathetically depressed as 
though no news had lost its proverbial value; and 
he had one of those blue-black faces that lend 
themselves to the look, his chin being in perpetual 
mourning for the day before. 

“Don’t go, Mullins! I’ve another job for you,” 
said Eugene Thrush. “Take the telephone direc¬ 
tory and the London directory, and sit you down 
at my desk. Look up ‘chemists’ under ‘trades’; 
there are pages of them. Work through the list 
with the telephone directory, and ring up every 
chemist who’s on the telephone, beginning with 
129 


The Camera Fiend 


the ones nearest in, to ask if he keeps cTAuvergne 
cigarettes for asthma. Make a note of the first 
few who do; go round to them all in turn, and be 
back here at nine with a box from each. Complain 
to each of the difficulty of getting ’em elsewhere— 
say you wonder there’s so little demand—and 
with any luck you should find out whether and 
to whom they’ve sold any since Wednesday even- 
ing.” 

“But surely that’s the whole point?” suggested 
the ironmaster. 

“It’s the next point,” said Thrush. “The first 
is to divide the chemists of London into the Ani¬ 
mals who keep the cigarettes and the Vegetables 
who don’t. I should really like to play the next 
round myself, but Mullins must do something 
while we’re out.” 

“While we’re out, Mr. Thrush?” 

“My dear Mr. Upton, you’re going to step 
across into the Cafe Royal with me, and have a 
square meal before you crack up!” 

“And what about your theatre?” asked Mr. 
Upton, to whom resistance was a physical im¬ 
possibility, when they had left the sombre Mullins 
intrenched behind telephone and directories. 

“The theatre! I was only going out of curios¬ 
ity to see the sort of tripe that any manager has 
130 


Mr. Eugene Thrush 

the nerve to serve up on a Friday in June; but 
Fm not going to chuck the drama that’s come 
to me!” 

The ironmaster dined with his head in a whirl. 
It was a remarkably good dinner that Thrush 
ordered, if as inappropriate to the occasion as to 
his own weight. His guest, however, knew no 
more what he was eating or drinking than he 
knew the names of the people in diamonds and 
white waistcoats who stared at the distraught 
figure in the country clothes. It even escaped his 
observation that the obese Thrush was an un¬ 
blushing gourmet with a cynical lust for Bur¬ 
gundy. The conscious repast of Mr. Upton con¬ 
sisted entirely of the conversation of Eugene 
Thrush, and of that conversation only such por¬ 
tions as exploited his professional theories, and 
those theories only as bearing on the case in 
hand. 

He was merely bored when Thrush tried to 
distract him with some account of the murder in 
which he himself was only interested because his 
myrmidon happened to have discovered the body. 
What was the murder of some ragamuffin in Hyde 
Park to a man from the country who had lost his 
son ? 

“I don’t see how your theory can work there,” 

I 3 I 


The Camera Fiend 


he sighed, out of pure politeness, when Thrush 
paused to punish the wine. 

“It should work all right,” returned Thrush. 
“You take an absolutely worthless life; what do 
you do it for? It must be one of two motives: 
either you have a grudge against the fellow or 
his existence is a menace to you. Revenge or 
fear; he wants your money, or he’s taken your 
wife! But what revenge can there be upon a 
poor devil without the price of a bed on his inde¬ 
scribable person ? He hasn’t anything to bless 
himself with, and he makes it a bit too hot for 
somebody who has, eh ? So you whittle it down. 
And then perhaps by sheer luck you run your 
blade into the root of the matter.” 

Thrush gave up trying to take the other out of 
himself, since his boldest statements were allowed 
to pass unchallenged, unless they dealt with the 
one subject on the poor man’s mind. The ces¬ 
sation of his voice, however, caused a twinge of 
conscience in the bad listener; he made a mental 
grab at the last phrase, and was astonished to 
find it germane to his own thoughts. 

“That’s the second time you’ve mentioned luck, 
Mr. Thrush!” 

“When was the first?” 

“You spoke of Friday as an unlucky day, as 
132 


Mr. Eugene Thrush 

God knows this one is to me! Are you of a 
superstitious turn of mind ?” 

“Not seriously.” 

“You don’t believe in dreams, for example?” 

“That’s another question,” said Thrush, his 
spectacles twinkling to colossal rubies as he sipped 
his Santenay. “Why do you ask?” 

“If you’re a disbeliever it’s no use my telling 
you.” 

“Perhaps I’m neither one thing nor the other.” 

“ Have you ever known a mystery solved through 
a dream ?” 

“I’ve heard of one,” said Thrush, with a sig¬ 
nificant stress upon the verb; “that’s the famous 
old murder in the Red Barn a hundred years ago. 
The victim’s mother dreamed three nights running 
that her missing daughter was buried in the Red 
Barn, and there she was all the time. There 
may have been other cases.” 

“Cases in which a parent has dreamt of an 
absent child, at the very time at which something 
terrible has happened to that child ?” 

“Any amount of those.” 

The father’s voice had trembled with the ques¬ 
tion. Thrush put down his glass as he gave his 
answer, and his spectacled eyes fixed themselves 
in a more attentive stare. 

133 


The Camera Fiend 

“Do you think they’re all coincidences ?” de¬ 
manded Mr. Upton hoarsely. 

“Some of them may be, but certainly not all,” 
was the reply. “That would be the greatest 
coincidence of the lot!” 

“I hardly like to tell you why I ask,” said Mr. 
Upton, much agitated; for he could be as emotional 
as most irascible men. 

“You’ve been dreaming about the boy?” 

“Not I; but my poor wife has; that was one 
reason why I daren’t tell her he had disappeared.” 

“Why? What was the dream?” 

“That she saw him—and heard a shot.” 

“A shot!” 

Thrush looked as though he had heard one 
himself, but only until he had time to think. 

“She says she did hear one,” added Mr. Upton, 
“and that she wasn’t dreaming at all.” 

“But when was this?” 

“Between six and seven yesterday morning.” 

This time Thrush did not move a muscle of 
his face; it only lit up like a Chinese lantern, and 
again he was quick to quench the inner flame; 
but now the coincidence was complete. Coin¬ 
cidences, however, had nothing to say to the A. 
V. M. system, neither was Eugene Thrush the 
man to jump to wild conclusions on the strength 
134 


Mr. Eugene Thrush 

of one. He asked whether the boy was very fond 
of shooting in the holidays, as though that might 
have accounted for the dream, but his father was 
not aware that he had ever smelt powder in his 
life. He little dreamt what Thrush was driving 
at! The tone of subsequent inquiries concerning 
Mrs. Upton’s health (already mentioned as the 
great reason for keeping the affair as long as 
possible a secret) sounded purely compassionate 
to an ear unconsciously aching for compassion. 

“Then that accounts for it,” said Thrush, when 
he had heard the whole sad story. There was 
the faintest ring of disappointment in his tone. 

“What do you mean?” 

“That anybody as ill as that, more particularly 
a lady, is naturally fanciful, I’m afraid.” 

“Then you think it a mere delusion, after all ?” 

“My dear Mr. Upton, it would be presump¬ 
tion to express an opinion either way. I only say, 
don’t think too much about that dream. And 
since you won’t keep me company in my cups, 
we may as well rejoin the faithful Mullins.” 

They ran into Mullins, as it happened, in Glass¬ 
house Street, and Mr. Upton for one would not 
have recognized him as the same being. His 
sepulchral face was alight with news—it was the 
transformation of the undertaker’s mute into the 

135 


The Camera Fiend 

wedding guest. And yet he had only one box of 
the d’Auvergne cigarettes to show for his evening’s 
work, and that chemist had declared it was the 
first he had sold for weeks. 

Thrush ordered his man upstairs, and took his 
late guest’s hand as soon as ever he dared. 

“You need a good night’s rest, my dear sir, 
and it’s no use climbing to my mast-head for noth¬ 
ing. Mullins and I will do best if you don’t 
mind leaving us to ourselves for the night; but 
first thing to-morrow morning I shall be at your 
service again, and I hope there will be some prog¬ 
ress to report.” 

Mullins was waiting for him with all the lights 
on, his solemn face still more strikingly illuminated. 

“Look at this, sir, look at this! These are the 
d’Auvergne cigarettes!” 

“So I perceive.” 

“This stump is the stump of a d’Auvergne 
cigarette.” 

“I hope you enjoyed it, Mullins.” 

“I didn’t smoke it, sir!” 

“Who did?” 

“That’s for you to say, sir; but it’s one of the 
little things I collected near the scene of the murder, 
but took for a common cheroot, yesterday morn¬ 
ing in Hyde Park.” 


! 3 6 


Mr. Eugene Thrush 

“Near the actual place ?” 

Thrush had pounced upon the stump, and was 
holding it under the strongest of the electric 
lamps. 

“Under a seat, sir, not above a hundred yards 
away!” 


137 


CHAPTER X 

Second Thoughts 

P OCKET had been dreaming again. What 
else could he expect? Waking, he felt that 
he had got off cheaply; that he might have been 
through the nightmare of battle, as described by 
one who had, and depicted in the engravings down¬ 
stairs, instead of on a mercifully hazy visit to the 
Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud’s. The 
trouble was that he had seen the one and not the 
other, and what he had seen continued to haunt 
him as he lay awake, but quite horribly when he 
fell back into a doze. There was nothing nebu¬ 
lous about the vile place then; it was as light and 
bright as the room in which he lay. The sinister 
figures in the panelled pens were swathed in white, 
as he had somewhere read that they always were 
at nights. Their evil faces were shrouded out of 
sight. But that only made their defiant, portly 
figures the more humanly inhuman and terrifying; 
it was as though they had all risen, in their wind- 

138 


Second Thoughts 

ing-sheets, from their murderers’ graves. Better 
by far their beastly faces, that you knew were 
wax! So he reasoned with himself, and screwed 
up his courage, and laid hands on one of the 
shorter figures that he could reach. It rocked 
stiffly in its place, a most palpable and reassuring 
waxwork. He unwound the cerements from the 
hollow and unyielding head; and the face was 
new to him; it had not been there the other after¬ 
noon. It was a young face like his own, as ill- 
mounted on high shoulders, with thickish lips ajar, 
and only a pair of intelligent eyes to redeem an 
apparent heaviness: one and all his own identical 
characteristics. And no wonder, for the last re¬ 
cruit to the waxen army of murderers was a faith¬ 
ful model of himself. 

There was no awaking from this dream: the 
dreamer was not positive that he had been asleep. 
The veiled sunlight in his room was just what it 
had seemed in that deserted dungeon of swaddled 
malefactors. The boy shuddered till the bed 
shook under him. But after that he still lay on, 
facing himself as he had seen himself, and his deed 
as others must see it soon or late. Not the actual 
accident in the Park; but this hiding in the heart 
of London, this skulking among strangers, this 
leaving his own people to mourn him as the dead! 

139 


The Camera Fiend 


The thought of them drew scalding tears. Never 
had they seemed so dear to him before. It was 
not only Lettice and their parents. Fred and 
Horace, how good they had been to him at school, 
and how proud he had been of them! What would 
they think of him if he went on skulking like this ? 
What would they have done in his place ? Any¬ 
thing but lie low like that, thought Pocket, and 
resolved forthwith to play the game as preached 
and practised by his brothers. It was strange 
that he should have been so dense about so plain 
a duty overnight; this morning he saw it as sharp 
as an image in perfect focus on the ground-glass 
screen. . . . To think that a mad photographer 
should have talked him into an attitude as mad 
as his own! This morning he saw the common- 
sense of the situation as well as its right and wrong 
Nothing would happen to him if he gave himself 
up, but anything might if he waited till he was 
caught. As for the consequences to his poor 
mother, surely in the end suspense and uncertainty 
would eat deeper into the slender cord of her life 
than the shock of the truth would cut. 

Having made up his mind, however, as to the 
only thing to do, the boy behaved characteristically 
in not hastening to do it. The ordeal in front of 
him, beginning in certain conflict with Baumgart- 
140 


Second Thoughts 

ner, and ending in a blaze of wretched notoriety, 
was a severe one to face; meanwhile he lay in such 
peace and safety as it was only human to prolong 
a little. That night, for all his moral innocence, 
he might lie in prison; let him make the most of a 
good bed while he had one, especially as he was 
still mysteriously free from asthma. The last con¬ 
sideration took his mind off the ethical dilemma 
for quite a little time. He remembered the doctor 
at home telling him that he himself had suffered 
from chronic asthma, but had lost it after a car¬ 
riage accident in which he was nearly killed. 

“My accident may have done the same for me,” 
thought Pocket—and was bitterly ashamed next 
moment to catch himself thinking complacently 
of any aspect of his deed. Its other aspects were 
a sufficient punishment. 

To get up and raise the green linen blind, 
flooding with sunshine the plain upstairs room 
to which Baumgartner had conducted his guest, 
was to conjure uncomfortable visions of the eccen¬ 
tric doctor, with his ferocious meerschaum, his 
blood-thirsty battle-talk, and all his arguments in 
favor of the course which Pocket had now deter¬ 
mined to abandon. The boy fully realized that 
he had been given his chance and had refused it. 
And of all the interviews before him, that with 
141 


The Camera Fiend 

Dr. Baumgartner was the one that he most dreaded 
and would have given most to escape. 

Could he escape it? That was an idea; others 
came of it. If he did escape, and did give himself 
up for what he had done, there was no reason why 
he should involve Baumgartner in that voluntary 
confession. Suppose he hailed the first cab he 
saw, and drove over to St. John’s Wood to borrow 
money (they could scarcely refuse him that), and 
then took the first train home to tell his father 
everything in the first instance, that father would 
never hear of his incriminating a stranger who had 
befriended him according to his lights. He him¬ 
self need never say where he had spent the twenty- 
four hours after the tragedy, even if he were ever 
to know. And so far he had no notion, thanks to 
the ridiculous posture prescribed by Baumgartner 
in the cab; he could only suppose the motive had 
been to keep him out of sight, the benefit to his 
breathing a mere pretext; and yet it was a curious 
result that after a day and a night he should still 
be in total ignorance of his whereabouts. 

He opened his window and looked out; but it 
was a back window, and the sunny little strip of 
garden below was one of many in a row. Old 
discolored walls divided them from each other 
and from the gardens of a parallel block of bigger 
142 


Second Thoughts 

houses, whose slates and chimneys towered above 
the intervening trees. The street in front of those 
houses was completely hidden, but the hum of its 
traffic travelled pleasantly to the ear, and there 
were other reassuring sights and sounds. In one 
of the contiguous gardens a very small boy was 
wheeling a doll’s perambulator; on the other side, 
where the fine, warm gravel reminded Pocket of 
the carroty kind at home, a man was mowing an 
equally trim lawn. Pocket listened to the murmur 
of the machine, and watched the green spray play¬ 
ing over the revolving knives, and savored the 
curiously countrified smell of cut grass; the com¬ 
bined effect was a still stronger reminiscence of 
his father’s garden, where his own old pony pulled 
the machine in leather shoes. 

Pecause such associations filled his eyes again, 
there seemed no end to them. Somebody was 
playing the piano near some open window, and 
playing almost as well as Lettice did, and playing 
one of her things! Pocket could not bear to listen 
or look out any longer, and he dressed as quietly 
as he could. He had almost resolved to slip out 
without a word, whatever else he did, if the oppor¬ 
tunity offered. It simply never occurred to him, 
until he made the discovery, that anybody would 
dare to lock him into his room! 

H3 


The Camera Fiend 

Yet they had done it; that infernal old German 
doctor had had the cheek to do it; and the effect 
on the boy, who so expressed the situation to him¬ 
self, was rather remarkable. A wholly ineffectual 
tug or two told him he was on the wrong side of 
the door for applying mere bodily strength, that 
either he must raise an ignominious shout for 
freedom or else achieve it for himself by way of the 
window. Unathletic as he always had been, he 
was sportsman enough not to hesitate an instant 
between the two alternatives; and on again look¬ 
ing out of the window, saw his way down at a 
glance. 

Immediately underneath was another window, 
opening on a leaded balcony over the bow-window 
in the drawing-room. To shift his bedstead with 
the least possible noise, to tie a sheet to it, and to 
slide down the sheet till he had but a few feet 
to drop into the balcony was the work of a very 
few minutes to one as excitedly determined as 
Pocket had become on finding himself a prisoner* 
Thought they would lock him in, did they ? They 
would just find out their mistake! It was exactly 
the same mood in which he had scaled the upright 
palings in defiance of the policeman who said he 
might not sleep in the Park. 

The balcony window was open, the room within 
144 


Second Thoughts 

empty. It was obviously Baumgartner’s bed-room. 
There was a camp bedstead worthy of an old 
campaigner, a large roll-top desk, and a waste- 
paper basket which argued either a voluminous 
correspondence or imperfect domestic service; it 
would have furnished scent for no short paper- 
chase. Otherwise the room was tidy enough, and 
so eloquent of Baumgartner himself, in its uncom¬ 
promising severity, that Pocket breathed more 
freely on the landing. And in the hall he felt 
absolutely safe, for he had gained it without the 
creaking of a stair, and there on the pegs hung his 
hat, but neither the cloak nor the weird wide¬ 
awake affected by his host. 

Baumgartner out! That was a bit of luck; and 
it was just like Pocket to lose a moment in taking 
advantage of it; but the truth was that he had 
made an interesting discovery. It was in that 
house the piano was being played. He heard it 
through the drawing-room door; he had heard it 
on the balcony up above; it had never stopped once, 
so silent had he been. It was that Phillida, with 
the large dark eyes, and she was playing something 
that Lettice sometimes played, and very nearly, 
though naturally not quite, as well. Pocket would 
have said that it was Mendelssohn, or Chopin, 
“or something,” for his love of music was greater 

H5 


The Camera Fiend 

than his knowledge. But it was not exactly the 
music that detained him; he was thinking more 
of the musician, who had shown him kindness, 
after all. It would be only decent to thank her 
before he went, and the doctor himself through 
his niece. If she knew he had been locked in, and 
he had to tell her how he had made his escape and 
yet not a sound—well, she would not think the less 
of him at all events, and so they would part for 
ever. Or perhaps not for ever! The juvenile in¬ 
stinct for romance was not to be stifled at such a 
stimulating moment. The girl would be sorry for 
him when she knew all; she might know enough 
to be sorry for him as it was; in any case it was the 
game to say good-by. 

The girl sprang from the music-stool in extraor¬ 
dinary excitement. Her large eyes were larger 
than ever, as it were with fear, and yet they blazed 
at the intruder. Pocket could not understand it, 
unless she already knew the truth. 

“I’m so sorry for startling you,” he apologized. 
“I just came in to say good-by.” 

And he held out a hand which she never seemed 
to see. 

“To say good-by!” she gasped. 

“Yes, Pve got to go. Pm afraid the doctor’s 
out?” 


146 


Second Thoughts 

“Yes, he is. Won’t you wait?” 

“I’m afraid I can’t.” 

She was shrinking from him, shrinking round 
toward the door. He stood aside, to let her bolt 
if that was her desire. And then she in turn took 
her stand, back to the door. 

“He’ll be very sorry to miss you,” she said more 
firmly and with a smile. 

“And I’m very sorry to miss him,” said Pocket 
unconscientiously enough for anybody. “He’s 
been most awfully good to me, and I wish you’d 
tell him how grateful I am.” 

“I’m afraid he won’t believe me,” the girl said 
dryly, “if he finds you gone.” 

“I must go—really I must. I shall get into an 
awful row as it is. Do you mind giving him one 
other message?” 

“As many as you like.” 

“Well, you might tell him from me that I’ll 
give myself away, but I’ll never give him! He’ll 
know what I mean.” 

“Is that all?” 

She was keeping him very cleverly, putting in 
her word always at the last moment, and again 
refusing to see his hand; but again it was the boy 
who helped to waste his own golden opportunity, 
this time through an indefensible bit of boyish 
braggadocio. 


H7 


The Camera Fiend 

“No; you may tell the doctor that if he wanted 
to detain me he went the worst way about it by 
locking me into my room! ,, 

She looked mystified at first, and then astounded. 

“How did you get out ?” 

“How do you suppose?” 

“I never heard anything!” 

“I took care you shouldn’t.” 

And he described the successful adventure with 
pardonable unction in the end. After that he 
insisted on saying good-by. And the young girl 
stood up to him like a little heroine. 

“I’m very sorry, but I can’t let you go, Mr. 
Upton.” 

“Can’t let me?” 

“I really am sorry—but you must wait to see 
my uncle.” 

He stood aghast before the determined girl. 
She was obviously older than himself, yet she 
was only a slip of a girl, and if he forced his way 
past—but he was not the fellow to do it—and 
that maddened him, because he felt she knew it. 

“Oh, very well!” he cried sarcastically. “If 
you won’t let me out that way, I’ll go this!” 

And he turned toward the tiny conservatory, 
which led down into the garden; but she was on 
him, and there was no hesitation about her; she 
held him firmly by the hand. 

148 


Second Thoughts 

“If you do I’ll blow a police whistle!” she said. 
“We have one—it won’t take an instant. You 
sha’n’t come out the front way, and you’ll be 
stopped if you climb the wall!” 

“But why? Do you take me for a lunatic, or 
what?” he gasped out bitterly. 

“Never mind what I take you for!” 

“You’re treating me as though I were one!” 

“You’ve got to stay and see my uncle.” 

“I sha’n’t! Let me go, I tell you! You shall— 
you shall! I hate your uncle, and you too!” 

But that was only half true, even then while he 
was struggling almost as passionately as though 
the girl had been another boy. He could not 
strike her; but that was the only line he drew, for 
she would grapple with him, and release himself 
he must. Over went walnut whatnots, and out 
came mutterings that made him hotter than ever 
for very shame. But he did not hate her even 
for what she made him say; all his hatred and all 
his fear were of the dreadful doctor whose will 
she was obeying; and both were at their highest 
pitch when the door burst open, and in he sprang 
to part them with a look. But it was a look that 
hurt more than word or blow; never had poor 
Pocket endured or imagined such a steady, silent 
downpour of indignation and contempt. It turned 
149 


The Camera Fiend 

his hatred almost in a moment to hatred of himself; 
his fear it only increased. 

“Leave us, Phillida, ,, said Baumgartner at last. 
Phillida was in tears and Pocket had been hanging 
his head; but now he sprang toward her.” 

“Forgive me!” he choked, and held the door 
open for her, and shut it after her with all the 
gallantry the poor lad had left. 


150 


CHAPTER XI 


On Parole 

“QO,” said Dr. Baumgartner, “you not only 
O try to play me false, but you seize the first 
opportunity when my back is turned! Not only 
do you break your promise, but you break it with 
brutal violence to a young lady who has shown 
you nothing but kindness!” 

Pocket might have replied with justice that the 
young lady had brought the violence upon herself; 
but that would have made him out a greater cad 
than ever, in his own eyes at any rate. He pre¬ 
ferred to defend his honor as best he could, which 
was chiefly by claiming the right to change his 
mind about what was after all his own affair. 
But that was precisely what Baumgartner would 
not allow for a moment; it was just as much his 
affair as accessory after the fact, and in accordance 
with their mutual and final agreement overnight 
Pocket could only rejoin that he had never meant 
to give the doctor away at all. 

“Idare say not!”said Baumgartner sardonically. 


The Camera Fiend 


‘‘It would have been dragged out of you all the 
same. I told you so yesterday, and you agreed 
with me. I put it most plainly to you as a case 
of then or never so far as owning up was concerned. 
You made your own bed with your eyes open, and 
I left you last night under the impression that you 
were going to lie on it like a man.” 

“Then why did you lock me in ?” cried Pocket, 
pouncing on the one point on which he did not 
already feel grievously in the wrong. The doctor 
flattered him with a slight delay before replying. 

“There were so many reasons,” he said, with a 
sigh; “you mustn’t forget that you walk in your 
sleep, for one of them. We might have had you 
falling downstairs in the middle of the night; but 
I own that I was more prepared for the kind of 
relapse which appears to have overtaken you. I 
was afraid you had more on your soul than you 
could keep to yourself without my assistance, and 
that you would get brooding over what has 
happened until it drove you to make a clean breast 
of the whole thing. I tell you it’s no good brood¬ 
ing or looking back; take one more look ahead, 
and what do you see if you have your way ? 
Humiliating notoriety for yourself, calamitous con¬ 
sequences in your own family, certain punishment 
for me!” 


l 5* 


On Parole 

“The consequences at home,” groaned Pocket, 
“will be bad enough whatever we do. I can’t 
bear to think of them! If only they had taken 
Bompas’s advice, and sent me round the world 
in the Senngapatam ! I should have been at sea 
by this time, and out of harm’s way for the next 
three months.” , 

“The Senngapatam ?” repeated the doctor. “I 
never heard of her.” 

“You wouldn’t; she’s only a sailing vessel, but 
she carries passengers and a doctor, a friend of 
Dr. Bompas’s, who wanted to send me with him 
for a voyage round the world. But my people 
wouldn’t let me go. She sails this very day, and 
touches nowhere till she gets to Melbourne. If 
I could only raise the passage-money, or even stow 
away on board, I could go out in her still, and 
that would be the last of me for years and years!” 

It was not the last of him in his own mind; 
suddenly as the thought had come, and mad as it 
was, it flashed, into the far future in the boy’s 
brain; and he saw himself making his fortune in 
a far land, turning it up in a single nugget, and 
coming home to tell of his adventures, bearded 
like the pard, another “dead man come to life,” 
after about as many years as the dream took sec¬ 
onds to fashion. And Baumgartner looked on as 

153 


The Camera Fiend 

though following the same wild train of thought, 
as though it did not seem so wild to him, but 
extremely interesting; so that Pocket was quite 
disappointed when he shook his head. 

“A stowaway with an attack of asthma! I think 
I see my poor young fellow! Why, they’d hear 
you wheezing in the hold, and you’d gasp out your 
whole story before you were in the Bay of Biscay! 
No, no, my fellow; you’ve taken your line, and 
you must stick to it, and stop with me till we can 
think of something better than a long sea voyage. 
If you say you won’t, I say I’ll make you—to save 
you from yourself—to save us both.” 

There was no mistaking the absolute intention 
in this threat; it was fixed and final, and the boy 
accepted it as he accepted his oppressor’s power 
to make good his words. It was true that he 
might have escaped already; the nearer he had 
been to it, the less chance was he likely to be given 
again. So reasoned Pocket from the face and 
voice now dominating him more powerfully than 
ever; but it is an interesting fact that his conclusion 
neither cowed nor depressed him as it might have 
done. There was actually an element of relief 
in his discomfiture. He had done his best to do 
his duty. It was not his fault that responsibility 
had been wrested from his shoulders and an evil 
*54 


On Parole 


hour delayed. And yet there was a certain, an 
immediate, a creature comfort in such delay, 
which was all the greater because unsought by 
him; it was a comfort that he had both ways, as 
the saying is, and from all points of view but that 
of his poor people wondering what had become of 
him. 

“If only they knew!” he cried; “then I shouldn’t 
care. Let me write to one of them! My mother 
needn’t know; but I must write to one of the others, 
and at least let them know I am alive and well. 
My sister would keep my secret; she’d play the 
game all right, I promise you! And I’d play any 
game you like if only you let me write a line to 
her!” 

The doctor would not hear of it at first. Event¬ 
ually he said he should have to inspect the letter 
before it went; and this proved the thin edge of 
consent. In the end it was arranged that Pocket 
should write what he liked to his sister only, and 
that Baumgartner should read and enclose it in 
a covering letter, so that everybody need not 
know it was a letter from the missing boy. Baum¬ 
gartner was to have it posted from St. Martin’s-le- 
Grand, to destroy all trace of a locality which 
he now refused point-blank to disclose even to 
the writer. And in return for the whole con- 

155 


The Camera Fiend 

cession the school-boy was to give his solemn word 
and sacred promise on the following points. 

He was not to set foot outside the house with¬ 
out Baumgartner, nor to show himself for a mo¬ 
ment at the windows back or front. 

On no account was he to confide in the doctor’s 
niece Phillida, to give her the slightest inkling 
of his connection with the latest of London mys¬ 
teries, or even of the scene, or any of the circum¬ 
stances of his first meeting with Baumgartner. 

“ You are bound to see something of each other; 
the less you say about yourself the better.” 

“But what can she think?” 

“What she likes, my young fellow! I am a 
medical man; medical men may bring patients 
to their houses even when they have ceased to 
practise in the ordinary way. It is no business 
of hers, and what she chooses to think is no affair 
of ours. She has seen you very ill, remember, 
and she had your doctor’s orders not to let you 
out of the house in his absence.” 

“She obeyed them like a little brick!” muttered 
Pocket, with a wistful heaviness. 

“She did what she was told: think no more 
about it,” said the doctor. “Give me your hand 
on these your promises, and die on your feet 
rather than break one of them! Now I trust you, 
156 


On Parole 

my young fellow; you will play the game, as you 
call it, even as the poor lads in these pictures 
played it at Gravelotte, and die like them rather 
than go back an inch. Look at this one here. 
No, not the one with the ridges, but here where 
we come to bayonets and the sword. See the 
poor devils of the Prussian Guard! See the sheet¬ 
lightning pouring into us from the walls of St. 
Privat! Look at that fellow with his head bound 
up, and this one with no head to bind. That’s 
meant for our colonel on the white horse. See 
him hounding us on to hell! And there’s a drum¬ 
mer drumming as though we could hear a single 
beat! Our very colors were blown to ribbons, 
you see, and we ourselves to shreds; but the shreds 
hung together, my young fellow, and so will you 
and I in our day of battle!” 

Baumgartner might have known his boy for 
years, so sure was his touch upon the strings of 
a responsive nature to strike the chords of a 
generous enthusiasm and to wake the echoes of 
noble deeds. Pocket attacked his letter with the 
heart of a soldier, hardened and yet uplifted for 
the fight; it was only when he found himself writ¬ 
ing down vague words, which nevertheless brought 
his innocent deed home to him as nothing had 
done before, that the artificial frost broke up, and 

157 


The Camera Fiend 

real tears ran with his ink. He begged Lettice 
not to think too hardly of him, still less to be 
anxious about him, or to make anybody else; they 
must not fret for him, he wrote more than once, 
without seeing the humor of the injunction. He 
was better than he had been for years, and in the 
best of hands. But something terrible had hap¬ 
pened; something he could not help, but would 
bitterly repent all his days, especially as it might 
prevent him from ever seeing any of them again. 
It was this monstrous remark and others, to which 
it led, that were literally blotted with the writer’s 
tears. But just then he saw himself in all vivid 
sincerity as an outcast who could never show him¬ 
self at home or at school again. And it required 
the spell of Baumgartner’s presence to make the 
prospect such as could be borne with the least 
degree of visible manhood. 

Be it remembered that he was not a man at all, 
but a boy in many ways younger than most boys 
of sixteen and three-quarters, albeit older in some 
few. He was old in imagination but young in 
common-sense. One may be imaginative and 
still have a level head, but it is least likely in 
one’s teens. The particular temperament does 
not need a label; but none who know it when they 
see it, and who see it here, will be surprised to 

158 


On Parole 


learn that this emotional writer for one was enor¬ 
mously relieved and lightened in spirit when he 
had got his letter off his mind and hands. 

True to his warning, Dr. Baumgartner began 
to glance at it with a kindly gravity; it was with 
something else that he shook his head over the 
second leaf. 

“This is not for me to read!” said he. “Fd 
rather run the risk of trusting your discretion.” 

No words could have enslaved poor Pocket 
more completely; he clasped the hand that pro¬ 
ceeded to write the covering note, and then the 
address, all openly before his eyes. And while 
the doctor was gone to the nearest messenger 
office to despatch the missive to the General Post- 
Office, ostensibly to catch a particular post, his 
prisoner would not have decamped for a hundred 
pounds, and the doctor knew it. 

Phillida did not appear at dinner, but at supper 
she did, and Pocket was only less uncomfortable 
in her absence, which he felt he had caused, than 
when they were both at table and he unable to 
say another word to express his sorrow for the 
unseemly scene of the forenoon. She spoke to 
him once or twice as though nothing of the kind 
had happened, but he could scarcely look her in 
the face. Otherwise both meals interested him; 
159 


The Camera Fiend 


they were German in their order, a light supper 
following the substantial middle-day repast; but 
it appeared that they both came from an Italian 
restaurant, and the English boy was much taken 
with the pagoda-like apparatus in which the dishes 
arrived smoking hot in tiers. It provided a further 
train of speculation when he remembered that 
he had never seen a servant in the house, and that 
the steps had struck him as dirty and the doctor’s 
waste-paper basket as very full. Pocket deter¬ 
mined to make his own bed next morning. He 
had meanwhile an unpleasing suspicion that the 
young girl was clearing away, for the doctor took 
him back into the drawing-room after supper; 
and later, when they returned for a game of 
billiards on the toy board, which they placed 
between them on the dining-table, both Phillida 
and the fragments had disappeared. 

The little billiards were a bond and a distrac¬ 
tion. They brought out Baumgartner’s simple 
side, and they emphasized the school-boy’s sim¬ 
plicity. Both played a strenuous game, the doctor 
a most deliberate one; his brows would knit, his 
mouth shut, his eyes calculate, and his hand obey, 
as though his cue were a surgical instrument 
cutting deep between life and death. It was a 
curious glimpse of disproportionate concentration; 

160 


On Parole 

even the Turk’s head was only lit to be laid aside 
as an obstruction. Pocket’s one chance was to 
hit hard and trust to the fortune that accrues on 
a small table. Both played to win, and the boy 
forgot everything when he actually succeeded in 
the last game. They had played very late for 
him, and he slept without stirring until Baum¬ 
gartner came to his room about eight o’clock next 
morning. 

Now Pocket had not seen a newspaper all 
Friday, but it was the first thing he did see on the 
Saturday morning, for the doctor was waving one 
like a flag to wake him. 

“Trust your vermin press to get hold of the 
wrong end of the stick!” he cried, with fierce 
amusement; “it only remains to be seen whether 
they succeed in putting your precious police on 
the wrong tack too. Really, it’s almost worth 
being at the bottom of a popular mystery to watch 
the smartest men in this country making fools 
of themselves!” 

“May I see?” asked Pocket; he had winced at 
more than one of these remarks. 

“Certainly,” replied Baumgartner; “here’s the 
journalistic wonder of the age, and there you are 
in its most important column. I brought it up 
for you to see.” 

The boy bit his lips as he read. His deed had 
161 


The Camera Fiend 

been promoted to leaded type and the highest 
rank in head-lines. It appeared, in the first place, 
that no arrest had yet been made; but it was con¬ 
fidently asserted (by the omniscient butt of Teu¬ 
tonic sallies) that the police, wisely guided by the 
hint in yesterday’s issue (which Pocket had not 
seen), were already in possession of a most im¬ 
portant clew. In subsequent paragraphs of preg¬ 
nant brevity the real homicide was informed that 
his fatal act could only be the work of a totally 
different and equally definite hand. Pocket gath¬ 
ered that there had been a certain commonplace 
tragedy, in a street called Holland Walk, in the 
previous month of March. A licensed messenger 
named Charlton had been found shot under cir¬ 
cumstances so plainly indicative of suicide that 
a coroner’s jury had actually returned a verdict 
to that effect. There appeared, however, to have 
been an element of doubt in the case. This the 
scribe of the leaded type sought to remove by 
begging the question from beginning to end. It 
had not been a case of suicide at all, he declared, 
but as wilful a murder as the one in Hyde Park, 
to which it bore a close and sinister resemblance. 
Both victims had been shot through the heart in 
the early hours of the morning; both belonged 
to one neighborhood and to the same dilapidated 
fringe of the community. A pothouse acquaint- 
162 


On Parole 

anceship was alleged between them; but the sug¬ 
gestion was that the link lay a good deal deeper 
than that, and that the two dead men were known 
to the police, who were busy searching for a third 
party of equal notoriety in connection with both 
murders. 

“But we know he had nothing to do with the 
second one,” said the boy, looking up at last. 
“It wasn’t a murder, either; neither was the first, 
according to the coroner’s jury, who surely ought 
to know.” 

“One would have thought so,” said Baum¬ 
gartner, with his sardonic smile; “but the yellow 
pressman knows better still, apparently.” 

“Do you suppose there’s a word of truth in 
what he says ? I don’t mean about Charlton or 
—or poor Holdaway,” said Pocket, wincing over 
his victim’s name, which he had just gleaned 
from the paper. “But do you think the police 
are really after anybody?” 

“I don’t know,” said Baumgartner. “What 
does it matter?” 

“It would matter a great deal if they arrested 
somebody for what I did!” 

The boy was no longer looking up; and his 
voice trembled. 

“It would alter the whole thing,” he mumbled 
significantly. 

163 


The Camera Fiend 

“I don't see it," returned the doctor, with grim 
good-nature. “The little wonder of the English 
reading world has nearly unearthed another mare's 
nest, as two of its readers know full well. No 
real harm can come of this typical farrago. Let 
it lead to an arrest! There are only two living 
souls who can't account for their time at that of 
this unfortunate affair." 

Pocket realized this; but it was put in a way 
that gave him goose-skin under the clothes. He 
was always seeing his accident in some new light, 
always encountering some new possibility, or 
natural consequence of his silence, which had not 
occurred to him before. But he was learning to 
keep his feelings under control, to set his face and 
his teeth against the regular reactions of his 
coward conscience and his fickle will. And once 
again did Dr. Baumgartner atone for an unin¬ 
tentional minor by striking a rousing chord on 
the very heartstrings of the boy. 

“Eight o'clock!" cried the magician, with 
a glance at his watch and an ear toward the 
open window. “The postman's knock from 
door to door down every street in town—house 
to house from one end of your British Islands to 
the other! A certain letter is without doubt 
being delivered at this very moment—eh, my poor 
young fellow ?" 


164 


CHAPTER XII 


Hunting with the Hounds 

E UGENE THRUSH was a regular reader of 
the journal on which Dr. Baumgartner 
heaped heavy, satire. Its feats of compression, 
its genius for head-lines, and the delicious expedi¬ 
ency of all its views, which enabled its editorial 
column to face all ways and bow where it listed, 
in the universal joint of popularity, were points 
of irresistible appeal to a catholic and convivial 
sense of humor. He read the paper with his 
early cup of tea, and seldom without a fat internal 
chuckle between the sheets. 

That Saturday morning, however, Mr. Thrush 
was not only up before the paper came, but for 
once he took its opinion seriously on a serious 
matter. It said exactly what he wished to think 
about the Hyde Park murder: that the murderer 
would prove to be the author of a similar crime, 
committed in the previous month of March, when 
the Upton boy must have been safe at school. If 
that were so, it was manifestly absurd to connect 


The Camera Fiend 

the lad with a mystery which merely happened 
to synchronize with that of his own disappearance 
—absurd, even if he were shown to have been 
somewhere near the scene of the murder, some¬ 
where about the time of its perpetration. 

That much, though no more, had, however, 
been fairly established overnight. It was a con¬ 
clusion to which Mullins, with the facile conviction 
of his class, had jumped on the slender evidence 
of the asthma cigarette alone; but before midnight 
Thrush himself had been forced to admit its ex¬ 
treme probability. There was a medicine cork as 
well as an asthma cigarette; the medicine cork had 
been found very much nearer the body; in fact, 
just across the pathway, under a shrub on the 
other side of the fence. It was Mullins, who had 
made both discoveries, who also craved permission 
to ring up Dr. Bompas, late at night, to ask if there 
was any particular chemist to whom he sent his 
patients with their prescriptions. Dr. Bompas 
was not at home, which perhaps was just as well, 
but his man gave the name of Harben, in Oxford 
Street. Harbens, rung up in their turn, found 
that they certainly had made up one of the doctor’s 
prescriptions on the Wednesday, for a young Mr. 
Upton, and, within half an hour, had positively 
identified the cork found by Mullins in Hyde 
166 


Hunting with the Hounds 

Park. It was still sticky with the very stuff which 
had put poor Pocket asleep. 

Yet Thrush could not or would not conceive 
any actual connection between a harmless school¬ 
boy and an apparently cold-blooded crime. He 
resisted the idea on more grounds than he felt dis¬ 
posed to urge in argument with his now strangely 
animated factotum. It was still a wide jump to a 
detestable conclusion, but he confined his criticism 
to the width of the jump. The cork and the 
cigarette might be stepping-stones, but at least 
one more was wanted to justify the slightest sus¬ 
picion against the missing boy. Let it be shown 
that he had carried fire-arms on the Wednesday 
night, and Thrush undertook to join his satellite 
on the other side; but his mental bias may be 
gauged from the fact that he made no mention of 
the boy’s mother’s dream. 

Mullins found him not only up, shaved and 
booted, but already an enthusiastic convert to 
the startling theory of a sensation journalist, and 
consequently an irritable observer of the saturnine 
countenance which darkened to a tinge of distinct 
amusement over the leaded type. 

“ So you don’t think there’s much in it, Mullins?” 

“I shouldn’t say there was anything at all, 
sir.” 


167 


The Camera Fiend 

Yet I suppose you remember the very similar 
occurence in Holland Walk ?” 

“Oh yes, sir, but it was a case of suicide.” 

“I don’t agree.” 

“But surely, sir, the jury brought it in sui¬ 
cide?” 

“The coroner’s jury did—in spite of the coroner 
—but it may come before another jury yet, Mul¬ 
lins! I remember the case perfectly; the medical 
evidence was that the shot had been fired at arm’s 
length. That isn’t the range at which we usually 
bring ourselves down! Then there was nothing 
to show that the man ever possessed a pistol, or 
even the price of one; he was so stony it would 
have gone up the spout long before. The very 
same point crops up in the case of this poor boy. 
Who says he ever had a revolver in his life ? His. 
father tells me explicitly that he never had; I 
happened to ask the question,” added Thrush* 
without explaining in what connection. 

“Well, sir,” said Mullins with respect enough 
in his tone, “you talk about jumping to conclu¬ 
sions, but it strikes me the gentlemen who write 
for the papers could give me some yards and a 
licking, sir!” 

This was a sprightly speech for Mullins; but 
it was delivered with the very faintest of deferen- 
168 


Hunting with the Hounds 

tial smiles, and Mr. Thrush shook his spectacles 
without one at all. 

“The gentlemen on this paper have a knack of 
lighting on the truth, however,” he remarked; 
“it may be by fair means, or it may be by foul, 
but they have a way of getting there before the 
others start.” 

Mullins remarked with quiet confidence that 
they were not going to do it this time. His posi¬ 
tion was, briefly, that he could not bring himself 
to believe in two separate mysteries, at one and 
the same time and place, with no sort of connection 
between them. 

“That would be too much of a coincidence,” 
said Mullins, sententiously. 

Thrush looked at him for a moment. 

“But life’s one long collection of coincidences! 
That’s what I’m always telling you; the mistake 
is to look on them as anything else. Don’t you 
call it a bit of a coincidence that both these men 
should meet their death at the very hour of the 
morning when you’re on your way over here from 
Notting Hill, and in much the same degree of 
latitude, which you’ve got to cross somewhere or 
other on your way ? Yet who has the nerve to 
say you must have gone through Holland Walk 
that other morning, and been mixed up in that 
affair because you are in this?” 

169 


The Camera Fiend 

“I don’t admit I’m mixed up in anything,” 
replied Mullins, with some warmth. 

“I mean as a witness of sorts. I was merely 
reducing your argument to the absurd, Mullins; 
you didn’t take me literally, did you ? It’s no 
use talking when we both seem to have made 
up our minds; but I’m always ready to unmake 
mine if you show me that young Mr. Upton carried 
a pistol, Mullins! Now I should like my break¬ 
fast, Mullins, and you must be roaring inside for 
yours. The man who’s been knocking up chemists 
all night is the man to whom breakfast is due; 
get your own and then mine, and after that you 
can tell me how you got on.” 

Anything more genial than the garrulous banter 
of Eugene Thrush, at his best, it was impossible 
to encounter or incur; he had been, however, for 
a few minutes at his worst, and it was difficult 
to see why the pendulum should have swung so 
suddenly to the other extreme. Mullins went 
about his business with his usual sleek solemnity. 
But Thrush was yet another man the moment he 
was alone. His face was a sunny background 
for ideas, misgivings, and half-formed plans, one 
after the other, whirling like clouds across a crim¬ 
son sky. But the sky was clear whenever Mullins 
was in the room. And at the breakfast-table 
there was not a cloud. 


Hunting with the Hounds 

“To come back to those chemists, and this 
shop-to-shop canvassing,” resumed Thrush, as 
Mullins poured out his tea; “how many have 
you done, and how many have we still to do 
between us?” 

Mullins produced a pocket-book that did him 
credit, and consulted notes as neat. 

“ Rung up when you were out at dinner— seven¬ 
teen. Kept Cigarettes d’Auvergne—one. That 
was ThornycrofVs in Shaftesbury Avenue, where 
Td just been when I met you down below in the 
street. In the night I knocked up other eight- 
and-twenty, all either in the neighborhood of 
Trafalgar Square or else on the line of the Park.” 

“Poor devils! I suppose you urged a pretty 
bad case?” 

“A matter of life or death.” 

“Well?” 

“Three more kept them, not counting Harbens: 
one in Knightsbridge, one in New Bond Street, 
and one a little way down the Brompton Road.” 

“Much demand in any of those quarters?” 

“Only in the Brompton Road; a literary gentle¬ 
man has a box regularly every week, and two in 
the autumn. Pringle, his name is.” 

“I know him; so he’s as breathless as his own 
yarns, is he?” murmured Thrush, to his buttered 

I 7 I 


The Camera Fiend 


egg. “But has one of these apothecaries sold a 
box of d’Auvergnes since Wednesday afternoon ?” 

“Two have,” said Mullins, “but one was to 
Mr. Pringle.” 

Thrush levelled inquiring spectacles. 

“How did you worm that out, Mullins?” 

“By changing my tune a bit, sir. I started 
asking if they knew anybody w T ho could recom¬ 
mend the cigarettes from personal experience, as 
we were only trying them on hearsay.” 

“Very smart of you, Mullins! And one wheezy 
novelist is the only consumer?” 

“That’s right, sir, but the man in Knightsbridge 
sold a box on Thursday to a doctor.” 

“Did you get the name?” 

“ Bone-Gardner, I think it was; a Dr. Otto 
Bone-Gardner.” 

“Baumgartner, I expect you mean!” cried 
Thrush, straightening a wry face to spell the 
name. “I’ve heard of an Otto Baumgartner, 
though I can’t say when or where. What’s his 
address ?” 

“He couldn’t tell me, sir; or else he wouldn’t. 
Suppose he thought I’d be turning the doctor out 
next. Old customer, I understood he was.” 

“For d’Auvergne cigarettes?” 

“I didn’t inquire.” 


172 


Hunting with the Hounds 

“My good fellow, that’s the whole point! I’ll 
go myself and ask for the asthma cigarettes that 
Dr. Baumgartner always has; if they say he never 
had them before, that’ll be talking. His being a 
doctor looks well. But I’m certain I know his 
name; you might look it up in Who's Who , and 
read out what they say.” 

And Mullins did so with due docility, albeit 
with queer gulps at barbaric mouthfuls such as 
the list of battle-fields on which Dr. Baumgartner 
had fought in his martial youth; the various 
Universities whereat he had studied psychology 
and theology in an evident reaction of later life; 
even the titles of his subsequent publications, which 
contained some long English words, but were 
given in German too. A copious contribution 
concluded with the information that photography 
and billiards were the doctor’s recreations, and 
that he belonged to a polysyllabically unpronounce¬ 
able Berlin club, and to one in St. James’s which 
Mullins more culpably miscalled the Parthenian. 

“Parthenon!” said Thrush, as though he had 
bitten on a nerve. “ But what about his address ? ” 

“There’s no getting hold of that address,” said 
Mullins, demoralized and perspiring. “It’s not 
given here either.” 

“Well, the chemist or the directory will supply 

m 


The Camera Fiend 

that if we want it, but I’m afraid he sounds 
a wheezy old bird. The author of Peripatetic 
Psychology deserves to have asthma all his nights, 
and After this Life smacks of the usual Schopen¬ 
hauer and Lager. No, we won’t build on Dr. 
Baumgartner, Mullins; but we’ll go through the 
chemists of London with a small tooth-comb, from 
here to the four-mile radius.” 

Thrush had finished breakfast, and Mullins was 
beginning to clear away, when a stormy step was 
heard upon the stairs, and in burst Mr. Upton 
with a panic-stricken face. He was colorless al¬ 
most to the neck, but he denied that he had any 
news, though not without a pregnant glance at 
Mullins, and fell to abusing London and the 
Londoners, but City men above all others, till 
Thrush and he should be alone together. The 
incidental diatribe was no mere padding, either; 
it was the sincere utterance of a passionately 
provincial soul. Nobody in all London, he de¬ 
clared, and apparently without excepting Mr. 
Thrush, cared a twopenny curse what became of 
his poor boy. In view of the fact that the present 
company alone knew of his disappearance, and 
not so very many more of the boy’s existence, 
this was an extravagantly sweeping statement. 
But the distracted man had a particular instance 
U4 


Hunting with the Hounds 

to bear him out; he had been to see his boy’s 
friends’ father, “a swine called Knaggs,” that 
very morning at his house in St. John’s Wood. 

“Rather early, wasn’t it?” suggested Thrush, 
whose manner was more softly sympathetic than 
it had been the night before. The change was 
slight, and yet marked. He was more solicitous. 

“Early!” cried Mr. Upton. “Haven’t I lost 
my boy, and wasn’t it these Cockney cads who 
turned him adrift in London ? I ought to have 
gone to them last night. I wish I had, when 
my blood was up after your dinner; for I don’t 
mind telling you now, Mr. Thrush, that in spite 
of your hospitality I was none too pleased at 
your anxiety to get rid of me afterward. It made 
me feel like doing a little bit for the boy on my 
own; but I’d called once on my way into town, 
and only seen a servant then, so I thought I’d 
make sure of putting salt on somebody by waiting 
till this morning.” 

The visitor paused to look harder than ever at 
Mullins, and Thrush seized the opportunity to offer 
an apology for his abrupt behavior in the street. 

“I confess I showed indecent haste,” said he; 
“but Mullins and I had our night’s work cut 
out, and he at any rate has not had his boots off 
since you saw him.” 


175 


The Camera Fiend 

“Hasn’t he?” cried Mr. Upton, in remorseful 
recognition of an unsuspected devotion; “then I’ll 
say what I’ve got to say in front of him, for you’re 
both my friends, and I’ll unsay all I said just now. 
Bear with my temper, both of you, if you can, 
for I feel beside myself about the boy! It was 
all I could do to keep my hands off that smug 
little lump of London inhumanity! Kept me wait¬ 
ing while he finished his breakfast, he did, and 
then came in polishing a hat as sleek as himself, 
and saying ‘Rather early!’—just as you set me 
off by saying yourself a minute ago.” 

“ But he seems to have told you something:, Mr. 
Upton ?” 

“Has he not! He began by telling me he was 
sorry for me, confound him! I could have made 
him sorrier for himself! He was sorry for me, 
but what could he do ? London was a large place, 
and ‘we Londoners’ were busy men. I told him 
so were some of us in the iron-trade, but not too 
busy to keep an eye on boys who were friends of 
our boys. He said London life was different; 
and I said so I could see. They never had spare 
beds at a moment’s notice, much less for boys who 
might set fire to the house or—or shoot them¬ 
selves-” 

His two hearers uttered a simultaneous excla- 


Hunting with the Hounds 

mation, and Mr. Upton stood glancing piteously 
from one to the other, as though his lad’s death- 
warrant were written in their faces. Eugene 
Thrush, however, looked so genuinely distressed 
that the less legible handwriting on the face of 
Mullins also attracted less attention. 

“Had he anything to shoot himself with?” in¬ 
quired Thrush, in a curiously gentle voice. 

Mr. Upton nodded violently as he moistened 
his lips. 

“He had, after all!” he croaked. “Little as 
I dreamt it yesterday, my unhappy boy, who had 
never to my knowledge pulled a trigger in his 
life before, was going about London with a loaded 
revolver in his pocket!” 

“Had he brought it from school?” asked 
Thrush, with a covert frown at the transfigured 
Mullins. 

Mr. Upton repeated what he had heard through 
the young Westminsters, with their father’s opin¬ 
ion of pawnbrokers’ shops as resorts for young 
school-boys, of young school-boys who frequented 
them, and of parents and guardians who gave 
them the chance. How the two gentlemen had 
parted without fisticuffs became the latest mystery 
to Eugene Thrush, whose only comment was that 
it behoved him all the more to do something to 
redeem the capital in the others eyes. 

177 


The Camera Fiend 

“Now we know why my poor wife heard a 
shot!” was the only rejoinder, in a voice not too 
broken to make Mullins prick up his ears; it was 
the first he had heard about the dream. 

“I wouldn’t say that, Mr. Upton. We know 
no more than we knew before. Yet I will own 
now,” exclaimed Thrush, catching Mullins’s bright 
eye, “that the coincidence will be tremendous if 
there’s nothing in it!” 

But only half the coincidence was present in 
the father’s mind; no thought of the murder had 
yet entered it in connection with his boy; and to 
hear so emphatic an echo to his foreboding was 
more than his fretted nerves could stand. In the 
same breath he pounced on Thrush for a pessimist 
—apologized—and humbly entreated him to take 
a more hopeful view. 

“There may have been an accident, Thrush, but 
not necessarily a fatal one!” 

An accident! Thrush had never thought of that 
explanation of the public mystery; but evidently 
Mullins had, judging by his almost fiendish 
grins and nods behind the poor father’s back. 
Thrush looked at both men with the troubled 
frown of a strenuously reasoning being—looked 
and frowned again—frowned and reasoned afresh. 
And then, all in an instant, the trouble lifted from 
his face; light had come to him in an almost 
178 


Hunting with the Hounds 

blinding flash, such as might well obscure the 
quality of the light; enough for Eugene Thrush 
that it lit him back to his mystery every bit as 
brightly as it lit him onward to its solution. 

He was even man enough to refrain from re¬ 
flecting it automatically in his face, as he put a 
number of apparently irrelevant questions to Mr. 
Upton about the missing boy. What was his 
character ? What its chief points ? Was he a boy 
with the moral courage of his acts ? Would he 
face their consequences like a man ? 

“I never knew him tell a lie in his life/’ said 
Mr. Upton, “ either to save his own skin or any¬ 
thing else; and it was a case of their young skins 
when they got into trouble with me! Poor Tony 
was the most conscientious of them all, and I hear 
that’s what they say of him at school.” 

Thrush put one or two further questions, and 
then said he had a clew, though a very slight one, 
which he was rather in a hurry to follow up him¬ 
self; and this time the ironmaster went off quietly 
of his own accord, with a dejected undertaking 
to be at his hotel when he was wanted. 

“I don’t like the look of our friend,” remarked 
Thrush, looking hard at Mullins when at last 
they were alone. “He shapes none too well for 
the strain he’s got to bear; if he cracks up there’ll 
179 


The Camera Fiend 

be a double tragedy, if not a triple one, in that 
family. We must catch our hare quickly, Mullins, 
or we may catch him too late.” 

Mullins turned on the disagreeable grin that 
Thrush had so resented a few minutes before; 
he took no notice of it now. 

“You’ll find your man,” said Mullins signifi¬ 
cantly, “the very moment that I find mine, Mr. 
Thrush.” 

“Meaning they’re the same person?” 

“To be sure.” 

“That this lad is the actual slayer of the man 
Hold away ?” 

“Surely, sir, it’s as plain as a pikestaff now?” 

“Not to me, Mullins—not to me.” 

Thrush was twinkling behind his great round 
goggles. 

“Then who do you think has done it, sir?” 
inquired Mullins, in deferential derision. 

“Ah! that’s another matter, my man; but I 
can tell you whom I hope to get arrested within 
another hour!” 

Mullins looked as though he could hardly believe 
his ears; his jaw, black as a crape hat-band this 
morning, fell in front of his grimy collar. 

“You’re actually thinking of arresting some one 
else?” 


180 


Hunting with the Hounds 

“I am—with your permission, Mullins.” 

“Tell me who it is, sir, for Heaven’s sake!” 
And with his fattest smile Thrush whispered 
into an ear that recoiled from his words as though 
they had been so many drops of boiling oil. 


CHAPTER XIII 


Boy and Girl 

P OCKET UPTON was able to relieve his 
soul of one load that morning. Dr. Baum¬ 
gartner had left the school-boy to his soap and 
water, taking the newspaper with him; but appar¬ 
ently Pocket had followed him down in quicker 
time than the other anticipated. At any rate the 
little lady of the house was all alone in the dining¬ 
room, where Pocket found her boiling eggs on 
the gas-fire, and had her to himself for several 
seconds of which he wasted none. There was 
neither grace nor tact in what he said, and his 
manner was naturally at its worst, but the peni¬ 
tential torrent came from his heart, and was only 
stemmed by the doctor's hasty arrival on the scene. 
Miss Platts had not been given time to say a word, 
but now she asked Mr. Upton how many minutes 
he liked his egg boiled, and would not let him do 
it himself, but smiled when he told her it was 
“done to a shake.” Dr. Baumgartner, on the other 
hand, scowled upon them both until observation 
182 


Boy and Girl 

or reflection had convinced him that no promises 
had been broken and no confidences exchanged. 

The callow pair saw something more of each 
other during the morning; for Pocket hotly re¬ 
sented being distrusted, and showed it by making 
up to the young girl under the doctor’s nose. 
He talked to her about books in the other room. 
He had the impertinence to invite her into the 
dining-room for a game of billiards, but the sense 
next moment to include her uncle in an amended 
form of more becoming suggestion. Baumgartner 
eventually countenanced a game, but spent most 
of the time with his back to the players and his 
eye on the street. The boy and girl got on very 
well now; they seemed frankly glad of each other, 
though he caught her more than once with a large 
and furtive eye on him. But she seemed to enjoy 
her baptism of school-boy slang. And it was only 
when she began to question him about his special 
vocabulary that Baumgartner looked on for a 
little and put in his word. 

“You see he still believes in his public school,” 
said he to Phillida, in a tone which reminded their 
visitor of his first breakfast in the house. 

“I should think I did!” cried Pocket, and did 
a little loyal boasting about the best of schools, 
and the best house in that school, until memory 

183 


The Camera Fiend 


took him by the throat and filled his eyes. It was 
twelve o’clock, and a summer’s Saturday. School 
was over for the week. Only your verses to do 
in your own time, and get signed by Spearman 
before you went up to dormitory on Saturday 
night; but meanwhile, Saturday afternoon! A 
match on the Upper, where you could lie on your 
rug and watch the game you couldn’t play; call- 
over at the match; ices and lemon-drinks in a tent 
on the field; and for Saturday supper anything 
you liked to buy, cooked for you in the kitchen 
and put piping hot at your place in hall, not even 
for the asking, but merely by writing your name 
plainly on the eggs and leaving them on the slab 
outside! It was not these simple luxuries that 
Pocket missed so sorely; it was the whole full 
life of ups and downs, and no yesterdays and 
no to-morrows, that he had lost forever since 
last Saturday. 

The heavy mid-day meal came in smoking from 
the Italian restaurant, and Pocket was himself 
again, as a boy will be; after all, they knew about 
him at home by this time, their worst fears were 
allayed, and in the end it would all come right. 
In the end he would be sitting in his own old 
place at home, instead of with strangers in an 
unknown street; telling them everything, instead 
184 


Boy and Girl 

of holding his peace; and watching even Fred 
and Horace listening to every word—much as Dr. 
Baumgartner was listening to something now. 

What was it ? Phillida was listening, too, and 
watching her uncle as she listened. Pocket did 
both in his turn. 

It was the voice of newspaper hawkers, shouting 
in couples, coming nearer with their shouts. Dr. 
Baumgartner jumped up from the table, and ran 
outside without his hat. 

His promise alone prevented Pocket from follow¬ 
ing and outstripping the doctor. He knew what 
the shouting was about before he could have sworn 
to a single raucous word. But Phillida could not 
know, and she resumed at once where they had 
left off before breakfast. 

“Of course I forgive you,” she whispered. “It 
was I began it!” 

“Began what?” 

“Our row yesterday.” 

Phillida had a demure twinkle, after all; but 
it was lost on Pocket now. “Pd forgotten all 
about it,” he said with superfluous candor, his 
ear still on the street. 

“I haven’t.” 

Her voice made him remember better. “I hope 
to goodness I didn’t hurt you ?” 

185 


The Camera Fiend 


“Of course you didn’t.” 

“But you must have thought me mad!” 

There was a slight but most significant pause. 

“Well, I never shall again.” 

“Then you did!” he gasped. Their eyes had 
met sharply; both young faces were flooded with 
light, and it was much the same light. There 
was no nonsense about it, but there was indig¬ 
nant horror on his side and indignant shame on 
hers. 

“You really are at school?” she whispered, 
not incredulously, but as one seeking assurance 
in so many words; and in a flash he saw what she 
had thought, what she had been deliberately made 
to think, that his beloved school was not a school 
at all, but an Asylum! 

But at that moment Dr. Baumgartner was heard 
bargaining at the gate with one raucous voice,, 
while the other went on roaring huskily, “Park 
murder—arrest! ’Rest o’ de Park murderer! 
Park murder—Park murder—arrest!” And Pocket 
sprang up from the table in a state that swept his 
last thoughts clean from his mind. 

The girl said something; he did not hear what. 
He was white and trembling, in pitiable case even 
to eyes that could only see skin-deep; but the 
doctor’s step came beating like a drum to him, 
186 


Boy and Girl 

and he was solidly seated when the doctor entered 
—without any paper at all. 

"It’s that murder the papers are all exploiting/’ 
he explained benignly. “They were shouting out 
something about an arrest; you would hear them, 
I dare say. But it’s the usual swindle; the police 
are merely hoping to effect an arrest. I threatened 
to send for them unless the scoundrel took his 
paper back!” 

He was in his lightest mood of sardonic gayety. 
The sins of the venders recalled those of “your 
vermin press itself”; the association was wilfully 
unfair, the favorite phrase a studied insult; but 
the English boy was either dense or indifferent, 
and Phillida’s great eyes were in some other world. 
Baumgartner subjected them both to a jealous 
scrutiny, and suddenly cried out upon his own 
bad memory. It appeared there was a concert 
at the Albert Hall, where “the most popular and 
handsome pair in England” (the inverted com¬ 
mas were in the doctors sneer) were being wel¬ 
comed on their return from the ends of the earth. 
He had intended going to hear what they could 
do; but Phillida should go instead; she was not 
past the ballad stage. And Phillida rose sub¬ 
missively, with unreal thanks which could not 
conceal her recognition of the impromptu pre- 
is? 


The Camera Fiend 


text for getting rid of her; her uncle called a tax¬ 
icab, and with harsh hilarity turned her off the 
premises in the frock she had been wearing all 
day. 

“And now,” said he, returning with a scowl, 
“what the devil were you two talking about 
while my back was turned ?” 

“Yesterday,” replied Pocket, more than ready 
for him, though his heart beat fast. 

“What about yesterday?” 

“Our scuffle in the other room.” 

“Is that all?” 

“No—I found out something; she didn’t tell 
me.” 

“What did you find out?” 

“That you let her think me mad!” cried Pocket, 
in monstrous earnest. He might have laughed 
at himself could he have seen his own reproachful 
face. But he could have killed Baumgartner for 
laughing at him; it did not occur to him that the 
laugh was partly one of pure relief. 

“Why, my young fellow, how else can I account 
for you ?” 

“You said she would think I was a patient.” 

“Exactly! A mental case.” 

“You had no business to make me out mad,” 
persisted Pocket, with dogged valor. 

188 


Boy and Girl 

“Pardon me! I had all the business in the 
world; and I beg that you’ll continue to foster 
the illusion as thoroughly as you did yesterday 
when I was out. It’s no good shaking your head 
at me; listen to reason,” continued Baumgartner, 
with an adroit change of tone. “And try, my good 
young fellow, do try to think of somebody besides 
yourself; have some consideration for my niece, if 
you have none for me.” 

Pocket was mystified, but still more incensed; 
for he felt himself being again put gently but 
clearly in the wrong. 

“And I should like to know,” he cried, “what 
good it does her to think she’s associating with a 
lunatic ?” 

“She would probably prefer the idea to that 
of a murderer,” was the suave reply. “I speak 
only of ideas; otherwise I should not make use of 
such an expression, even in jest. It’s as ugly 
as it’s ridiculous in your case. Yet you heard 
for yourself that others are applying the horrid 
term in all sobriety.” 

“I heard more than that,” returned Pocket. 
“They’ve arrested somebody!” 

“I thought I told you there was no truth in 
that?” 

But Baumgartner had winced for once, and 
189 


The Camera Fiend 


the boy had seen it, and his retort was a preco¬ 
cious inspiration. 

“That was only to avoid a scene at table, Dr. 
Baumgartner!” 

“Well, my young fellow,” said the doctor, after 
one of his wise pauses, “and what if it was?” 

“I can’t sit here and let an innocent man lie in 
prison.” 

“He won’t lie long.” 

“It’s absolutely wicked to let them keep him 
at all.” 

“Nor will they, longer than another hour or 
two.” 

“Well, if they do, you know what I shall do!” 

Pocket had never displayed such determination, 
nor incurred quite the same measure or quality 
of wrath that Baumgartner poured upon him 
without a word for the next few moments. It 
was a devouring gaze of sudden and implacable 
animosity. The ruthless lips were shut out of 
sight, yet working as though the teeth were being 
ground behind them; the crow’s-footed face flushed 
up, and the crow’s-feet were no more; it was as 
though age was swallowed in that flood of speech¬ 
less passion, till the whole man was no older than 
the fiery eyes that blazed upon the boy. And 
yet the most menacing thing of all was the com- 
190 


Boy and Girl 

plete control with which the doctor broke this 
pregnant silence. 

“You say that. I say otherwise. You had 
better find a book in the other room till you know 
your own mind again.” 

“I know it now, unless they release that man,” 
said Pocket through his teeth, although they 
chattered. 

“Give them a chance, and give yourself one! 
It will be time to think of clearing other people 
when they fail to clear themselves. Have more 
patience! Think of your own friends, and give 
them time too.” 

If the last allusion was to the lad’s letter, due 
in Leicestershire that morning, it was as happy 
as all Baumgartner’s last words. If he meant 
himself to be included among Pocket’s friends, 
there was food for thought in the suggestion that 
a man of the doctor’s obvious capacity was not 
idle in the boy’s best interests. Pocket was made 
to feel rather ashamed of himself, as usual; but 
he could not forget the concentrated fury of the 
look which had not been weakened by infuriate 
words; and the recollection remained as an excuse, 
as well as a menace, in his mind. He had time 
enough to think it over. Dr. Baumgartner smoked 
his meerschaum in the gathering shade at the 

I 9 I 


The Camera Fiend 


back of the house. The school-boy sulked for 
some time in the big chair, but eventually took the 
doctor at his word about a book. 

If it be ever true that a man may be known by 
his books, it was certainly so to some extent in the 
case of Dr. Otto Baumgartner. His library was 
singularly small for an intellectual man who wrote 
himself, and a majority of the volumes were in 
languages which no public school-boy could be 
expected to read; but of the English books many 
were on military subjects, some few anthropo¬ 
logical; there were photographic year-books and 
Psychical Research Reports by the foot or yard, 
and there was an odd assortment of second-hand 
books which had probably been labelled “occult” 
in their last bookseller’s list. Boismont on Hallu¬ 
cinations was one of these; it was the book for 
Pocket. He took the little red volume down, and 
read a long chapter on somnambulism, in the big 
chair. In a way it comforted him. It was some¬ 
thing to find that he was far from being the only 
harmless creature who had committed a diabolical 
deed in his sleep; here among several cases was 
one of another boy who had made an equally 
innocent and yet determined.attempt on his own 
father. But there was something peculiar in poor 
Pocket’s case, something that distinguished it from 
192 


Boy and Girl 

any of those cited in the book, and he was still 
ferreting for its absolute fellow when Phillida came 
in long before he expected her. Boismont had 
made the time fly wonderfully, in spite of every¬ 
thing; the girl, too, appeared to have been taken 
out of herself, and talked about her concert as 
any other young girl might have done, both to 
Pocket and her uncle, who glided in at once from 
the garden. The doctor, however, was himself in 
mellower mood; and they were having tea, for all 
the world like any ordinary trio, the girl still mak¬ 
ing talk about sundry songs, the man quizzing 
them and her, and the boy standing up for one 
that his sister sang at home, when a metallic tattoo 
put a dramatic stop to the conversation. 

The two young people, but not their elder, were 
startled quite out of their almost inadvertent tran¬ 
quillity; and the knocker was not still before Pocket 
realized that it was the first time he had heard it. 
No letters were delivered at that house; not a soul 
had he seen or heard at the door before. Even 
in his excitement, however, with its stunning re¬ 
crudescence of every reality, its instantaneous 
visions of his people or the police, there was room 
for a measure of disgust when the girl got up, at 
an ungallant nod from the German, to go to the 
door. 


193 


The Camera Fiend 


"It’s a huge fat man,” whispered Phillida on 
her return to the big room at the back of the house. 
“Here’s his card.” 

“Thrush!” muttered Baumgartner as though he 
knew the name, and he glowered at the two young 
faces on which it made no impression whatever. 
It was plain how he hated leaving them together; 
but for once it must be done, and done quickly— 
with both doors open and the visitor’s very move¬ 
ments audible on the steps. To the door the 
doctor must go, and went, shutting that one point¬ 
edly behind him. 

The young creatures, looking in each other’s 
eyes, listened for raised voices and the slam of 
prompt expulsion; but the voices were pitched too 
low to reach their ears in words, and were only 
interrupted by the sound of footsteps in the hall, 
and the perfectly passive closing of an outer and 
an inner door in quick succession. 

“He’s taken him into the dining-room,” mur¬ 
mured Phillida. “Who can it be?” 

“Hasn’t he any friends ?” 

“None who ever come here; none of that name 
anywhere, I feel sure.” Her great eyes, without 
leaving his for an instant, filled with thought as 
a blank screen takes a shadow. “ I wonder if it’s 
about that!” she whispered. 

194 


Boy and Girl 

“What?” 

“What they were calling out with the news¬ 
papers while we were at table.” 

There was a pause. The look in her eyes had 
changed. It was purely penetrating now. 

“Why should it be?” asked Pocket, his own 
eyes falling. 

“IPs no use asking me, Mr. Upton.” 

“But I don’t understand the question.” 

“Is that true?” 

“No,” he muttered; “it isn’t.” 

She was leaning over to him; he felt it without 
looking up. 

“Mr. Upton,” she said, speaking quickly in the 
undertone they were both instinctively adopting, 
“you know now what I thought about you at first. 
I won’t say what made me; but that was what I 
thought, but could hardly believe, and never will 
again. It makes it all the more a mystery, your 
being here. I can’t ask my uncle—he tells me 
nothing—but there’s something I can and must 
ask you.” 

Pocket hung his head. He knew what was 
coming. It came. 

“My uncle brought you here, Mr. Upton, on 
the very morning that thing happened they were 
calling out about to-day. In the Park. It is to 
195 


The Camera Fiend 


the Park he goes so often in the early morning 
with his camera! How can I say what I want to 
say ? But, if you think, you will see that every¬ 
thing points to it; especially the way he ran out for 
that paper—and hid the truth when he came in!” 

Pocket looked up at last. 

“I know the truth.” 

“About the arrest?” 

“Yes; it was quite obvious, and he admitted 
it when you’d gone.” 

“Why not before?” 

“I couldn’t tax him about it in front of you,” 
he muttered, looking up and down quickly, un¬ 
able to face her fierce excitement. 

“Do tell me what it is you both know about this 
dreadful case!” 

“I can’t,” the boy said hoarsely; “don’t ask 
me.” 

“Then you know who did it. I can see you do.” 

There was a new anguish even in her whisper; 
he could hear what she thought. 

“It was nobody you care about,” he mumbled, 
hoarser than before, and his head lower. 

“You don’t mean-” 

She stopped aghast. 

“I can’t say another word—and you won’t say 
another to me!” he added, a bitter break in his 
196 


Boy and Girl 

muffled voice. He longed to tell her it had been 
an accident, to tell her all; but he had given his 
word to Baumgartner not to confide in her, and 
he did not think that he had broken it yet. 

“You don’t know me,” she whispered, and for 
a moment her hand lay warm in hi-s; “trust me! 
I’m your friend in spite of all you’ve said—or 
done!” 

Dr. Baumgartner might have been ten minutes 
getting rid of the intruder; before that he had 
been first amazed and then relieved to hear the 
piano in the drawing-room; and that was all his 
anxious ear had heard of either boy or girl during 
his absence. Yet the boy was not standing over 
the piano, as he might have been, for Phillida was 
trying to recall one of the concert songs he said 
his sister sang. Pocket, however, was staring out 
into the garden with a troubled face, which he 
turned abruptly, aggressively, and yet apprehen¬ 
sively to meet the doctor’s. 

But the doctor no longer looked suspiciously 
from him to Phillida, but stood beaming on them 
both, and rubbing his hands as though he had 
done something very clever indeed. 


197 


CHAPTER XIV 


Before the Storm 

S UNDAY in London has got itself a bad name 
among those who occasionally spend one at 
their hotel, and miss the band, their letters, and 
the theatre at night; but at Dr. Baumgartner’s 
there was little to distinguish the seventh day from 
the other six. The passover of the postman, that 
boon to residents and grievance of the traveller, 
was a normal condition in the dingy house of no 
address. More motor-horns were heard in the 
distance and less heavy traffic; the sound of church 
bells came as well through the open windows; then 
the street door shut, and there was a long period 
without Phillida, until it opened and shut again, 
and in she peeped with her parasol and prayer- 
book, as though they were all quite ordinary people 
without a guilty secret among them! 

Such was the Sunday morning. It was fine and 
warm. Dr. Baumgartner pottered about his un¬ 
tidy little garden, a sun-trap again as Pocket had 
seen it first; the Turk’s head perspired from in¬ 
ternal and external heat; but its rich yellow, shad- 
198 


Before the Storm 

ing into richer auburn, clashed rather with a red 
geranium which the doctor wore jauntily in the 
button-hole of his black alpaca jacket. 

It was Phillida who had given him the flower 
at breakfast. She grew what she could in the 
neglected garden; the plants in the miniature con¬ 
servatory were also hers, though the doctor took 
a perfunctory interest in them, obviously on her 
account. It was obvious at least to Pocket Upton. 
He saw all these things, and what they meant. 
He was not without his little gifts of observation 
and deduction. He noticed the difference in 
Baumgartner’s voice when he addressed his niece, 
the humane kindling of the inexorable eyes, and 
to-day he thought he saw a reciprocal softening 
on the part of Phillida. There had been none to 
see yesterday or the day before. It was her uncle 
whom the girl had seemed unable to forgive for 
the unseemly scuffle of Friday morning. But now 
it was as though memory and common fairness had 
set years of kindness against these days of unen¬ 
durable mystery, and bidden her endure them 
with a better grace. If she felt she had been dis¬ 
loyal to him, she could not have made sweeter 
amends than she did by many an unobtrusive 
little office. And she exchanged no more con¬ 
fidences with poor Pocket. 

199 


The Camera Fiend 


Yet these two were together most of the day; all 
three were; and it was a strangely peaceful day, 
a day of natural hush, and the cessation of life’s 
hostilities, such as is sometimes almost pointedly 
bestowed before or after a time of strain. It was 
a day on which Pocket certainly drew his spiritual 
breath more freely than on any other since the 
dire catastrophe. There were few fresh clouds; 
perhaps the only one before evening was the re¬ 
moval of the book on hallucinations in which 
Pocket had become interested on the Saturday 
afternoon. It was no longer lying about the room 
as he had left it. There was a gap in its place 
in the shelf. The book had been taken away from 
him; it made him feel as though he were back 
again at his very first dame’s school. 

And the church bells sent him back to the school 
he was at now! They were more mellow and se¬ 
date than the chapel bells there, that rung you down 
the hill at the double if you were late and not too 
asthmatical; and Pocket saw and heard himself 
puffing up the opposite hill to take his place for 
chapel call-over in the school quad. The fellow's 
would be forming in squads there now, ail in their 
Sunday tails or Eton jackets as the case might be; 
of course Pocket was in tails, though still rather 
proud of them. The masters, in their silk hoods 
200 


Before the Storm 


or their rabbit-skins were prominent in his mind’s 
eye. Then came the cool and spacious chapel, 
with its marble pulpit and its brazen candelabra, 
and rows of chastened chapel faces, that he knew 
better than his own, giving a swing to chants which 
ran in his head at the very thought. How real it 
all was to him, and how unreal this Sunday morn¬ 
ing, in the sunny room with the battle engravings 
over the bookcases, and the walnut chairs in front 
of them, and Dr. Baumgartner in and out in his 
alpaca coat! After chapel he would have gone 
for a walk with Blundell minor , most probably, or 
else written his letter home and got it over. And 
that chapter would have ended with cold boiled 
beef and apple-pie with cloves in it at Spearman’s. 

The Italian restaurant which sent in Dr. Baum¬ 
gartner’s meals certainly provided richer fare than 
that. There was a top floor of soup in the port¬ 
able contrivance, and before the meat a risotto , 
which the doctor praised without a single patriotic 
reservation. 

“Italy is a country where one can live,” said 
he. “Not that yotl must understand me to be 
altogether down on your own fatherland, my young 
fellow; there is something to be said for London, 
especially on a Sunday. No organs from my dear 
Italy, none of those so-called German bands which 
201 


The Camera Fiend 


we in Germany would not tolerate for a moment; 
no postman every hour of the day, and no jail-birds 
crying false news down the streets.” 

Pocket looked for a grim twinkle in the speaker’s 
eye, but found it fixed on Phillida who had not 
looked up. Instinct prompted Pocket to say some¬ 
thing quickly; that he had not seen a postman 
there was the actual remark. 

“That is because I conduct my correspondence 
at my club,” explained the doctor. “I give out 
no other address; then you only get your letters 
when you want them.” 

“Do you often go there?” the boy ventured to 
inquire, devoutly wishing he would go that after¬ 
noon. 

“Not when I have visitors,” replied Baumgart¬ 
ner, with a smiling bow. “And I look upon my 
patients in that light,” he added, with benevolent 
but futile hypocrisy, embarrassing enough to Phil¬ 
lida, but not more so than if she had still believed 
it to be the truth. 

Silence ensued until they were all in the other 
room; then the niece took refuge at her piano, 
and this time Pocket hung over her for an hour 
or more. He went through her music, and asked 
for everything that Lettice played or sang. Phil¬ 
lida would not sing to him, but she had the mak- 
202 


Before the Storm 

ings of a pianist. The boy’s enthusiasm for the 
things he knew made her play them as well as ever 
he had heard them played. Even the doctor, 
dozing in the big chair with eyes that were never 
quite shut, murmured his approval more than once; 
he loved his Mendelssohn and Schubert, and had 
nothing to say against the Sousas and others that 
the boy picked out as well and mentioned with 
ingenuous fervor in the same breath. Pocket 
would have sung himself if the doctor had not been 
there, for he had a bit of a voice when he was free 
from asthma; and once or twice he stopped listen¬ 
ing to wonder at himself. Could he be the boy 
who had killed a man, however innocently, three 
days before ? Could it be he whom the police 
might come and carry off to prison at any moment ? 
Was it true that he might never see his own people 
any more ? Such questions appalled and stunned 
him; he could neither answer them nor realize their 
full import. They turned the old man in the chair, 
who alone could answer them, back into the goblin 
he had seemed at first. Yet they did give a certain 
shameful zest and excitement even to this quiet 
hour of motley music in his presence. 

Besides, there was always one comfort to re¬ 
member now: his letter home. Of course Lettice 
would show it to their father; of course something 
203 


The Camera Fiend 


would be done at once. Shame and sorrow for 
the accident would be his forever; but as for his 
present situation, there were moments when Pocket 
felt rather like a story-book cabin-boy luxuriously 
marooned, and already in communication with the 
main-land. 

He wondered what steps had been taken so far. 
No doubt his father had come straight up to town; 
it was a moving thought that he might be within a 
mile of that very room at that very moment. Would 
all the known circumstances of his disappearance 
be published broadcast in the papers ? Pocket 
felt he would have red ears all his life if that were 
done; and yet it had hurt him a little to gather from 
Baumgartner that so far there was nothing in the 
papers to say he had so much as disappeared. 
That fact must have been known since Thursday 
or Friday. Once it did cross his mind that to keep 
it from his mother they would have to keep it out 
of the papers. Well, as long as she did not know! 

He pictured the blinds down in her room; it 
was the hour of her afternoon rest. If he were at 
home, he would be going about quietly. Lettice 
would be reading or writing in the morning-room, 
most probably. Father would be gloating over 
his rhododendrons, with a strong cigar; in his last 
letter the boy had heard how beautiful they were. 

204 


Before the Storm 

Horace might be with him, smoking a cigarette, 
if he and Fred were not playing tennis. Their 
pocket edition had not to look very far ahead to 
see himself smoking proper cigarettes with the 
others, to hear his own voice telling them of his own 
experience—of this very hour at Dr. Baumgartner’s. 
Even Fred and Horace would have to listen to 
that! Pocket looked at the long lean figure in 
the chair, at the eyelids never quite closed, and so 
imparting at once a softening and a sinister effect. 
He noted the drooping geranium in his button¬ 
hole, and gray ash from the Turk’s head sprinkling 
the black alpaca coat. It brought the very phrases 
of a graphic portrait almost to his lips. 

Yet if anybody had told the boy he was begin¬ 
ning to gloat over the silver lining to the cloud that 
he was under, and that it was not silver at all but 
one of the baser metals of the human heart, how 
indignantly he had denied it at first, how humbly 
seen it in the end! 

When Phillida went off to make the tea her 
uncle sought his room and sponge, but did not 
neglect to take Pocket with him. Pocket was for 
going higher up to his own room; but Baumgartner 
said that would only make more work, in a tone 
precluding argument. It struck Pocket that the 
doctor really needed sleep, and was irritable after 
20 5 


The Camera Fiend 


a continuous struggle against it. If so, it served 
him right for not trusting a fellow—and for putting 
Boismont in the waste-paper basket, by Jove! 

There was no mistaking the red book there; it 
was one of the first things Pocket noticed while the 
doctor was stooping over his basin in the opposite 
corner; and the school-boy’s strongest point, be it 
remembered, was a stubborn tenacity of his own 
devices. He made a dive at the waste-paper basket 
meaning to ask afterward if the doctor minded 
his reading that book. But the question never 
was asked; the book was still in the basket when 
the doctor had finished drying his face; and the 
boy was staring and swaying as though he had 
seen the dead. 

“Why, what’s the matter with my young fel¬ 
low?” inquired Baumgartner solicitously. 

“Nothing! I’ll be all right soon,” muttered 
Pocket, wiping his forehead and then his hand. 

“You look faint. Here’s my sponge. No, lie 
flat down there first!” 

But Pocket was not going to lie down on that 
bed. 

“I do feel seedy,” he said, in a stronger voice 
with a new note in it, “but I’m not going to faint. 
I’m quite well able to go upstairs. I’d rather lie 
down on my own bed, if you don’t mind.” 

206 


Before the Storm 


His own bed! The irony struck him even as 
he said the words. He was none the less glad to 
sit down on it; and so sitting he made his first close 
examination of two or three tiny squares of paper 
which he had picked out of the basket in the doc¬ 
tor’s room instead of Boismont’s book on halluci¬ 
nations. 

There had been no hallucination about those 
scraps of paper; they were fragments of the boy’s 
own letter to his sister, which Dr. Baumgartner 
had never posted at all. 


207 


CHAPTER XV 


A Likely Story 


T that moment help was as far away as it 



1 Jl had been near the day before, when Eugene 
Thrush was closeted in the doctor’s dining-room; 
for not only had Mr. Upton decamped for Leices¬ 
tershire, without a word of warning to anybody, 
on the Saturday afternoon, but Thrush himself 
had followed by the only Sunday train. 

A bell was ringing for evening service when he 
landed in a market town which reversed the natural 
order by dozing all summer and waking up for 
the hunting season. And now the famous grass 
country was lying in its beauty-sleep, under a 
gay counterpane of buttercups and daisies, and 
leafy coverts, with but one blot in the sky-line, in 
the shape of a permanent plume of sluggish smoke. 
But the works lay hidden, and the hall came first; 
and Thrush, having ascertained that this was it, 
abandoned the decrepit vessel he had boarded at 
the station and entered the grounds on foot. 

A tall girl, pacing the walks with a terribly 


208 


A Likely Story 

anxious face, was encountered and accosted before 
he reached the house. 

“I believe Mr. Upton lives here. Can you tell 
me if he’s at home ? I want to see him about 
something.” 

Lettice flushed and shrank. 

“I know who you are! Have you found my 
brother ?” 

“No; not yet,” said Thrush, after a pause. 
“But you take my breath away, my dear young 
lady! How could you be so sure of me? Is it 
no longer to be kept a secret, and is that why your 
father bolted out of town without a word ?” 

“It’s still a secret,” whispered Lettice, as though 
the shrubs had ears, “only I’m in it. Nobody 
else is—nobody fresh—but I guessed, and my 
mother was beginning to suspect. My father never 
stays away a Sunday unless he’s out of England 
altogether; she couldn’t understand it, and was 
worrying so about him that I wired begging him 
to come back if only for the night. So it’s all my 
fault, Mr. Thrush; and I know everything but 
what you’ve come down to tell us!” 

“That’s next to nothing,” he shrugged. “It’s 
neither good nor bad. But if you can find your 
father I’ll tell you both exactly what I have found 
out.” 


209 


The Camera Fiend 


In common with all his sex, he liked and trusted 
Lettice at sight, without bestowing on her a passing 
thought as a person capable of provoking any 
warmer feeling. She was the perfect sister—that 
he felt as instinctively as everybody else—and a 
woman to trust into the bargain. It would 
be cruel and quite unnecessary to hide anything 
from that fine and unselfish face. So he let her 
lead him to a little artificial cave, lined and pungent 
with pitch-pine, over against the rhododendrons, 
while she went to fetch her father quietly from the 
house. 

The ironmaster amplified the excuses already 
made for him; he had rushed for the first train 
after getting his daughter’s telegram, leaving but 
a line for Thrush with his telephone number, in 
the hopes that he would use it whether he had 
anything to report or not. 

“As you didn’t,” added Mr. Upton, in a still 
aggrieved voice, “I’ve been trying again and again 
to ring you up instead; but of course you were 
never there, nor your man Mullins either. I was 
coming back by the last train, however, and should 
have been with you late to-night.” 

“Did you leave the motor behind?” 

“Yes; it ’ll be there to meet me at St. Pancras.” 

“It may have to do more than that,” said 
210 


A Likely Story 

Thrush, spreading his full breadth on the pitch- 
pine seat. “I’ve found out something; how much 
or how little it’s too soon to tell; but I wasn’t 
going to discuss it through a dozen country ex¬ 
changes as long as you wanted the thing a dead 
secret, Mr. Upton, and that’s why I didn’t ring 
you up. As for your last train, I’d have waited 
to meet it in town, only that wouldn’t have given 
me time to say what I’ve got to say before one 
or other of us may have to rush off somewhere 
else by another last train.” 

“Do, for God’s sake, say what you’ve got to 
say!” cried Mr. Upton. 

“Well, I’ve seen a man who thinks he may have 
seen the boy!” 

“Alive?” 

“And perfectly well—but for his asthma—on 
Thursday.” 

The ironmaster thanked God in a dreadful 
voice; it was Lettice who calmed him, not he her. 
Her eyes only shone a little, but his were blinded 
by the first ray of light. 

“Where was it?” he asked, when he could ask 
anything. 

“I’ll tell you in a minute. I want first to be 
convinced that it really was your son. Did the 
boy take any special interest in Australia?” 

211 


The Camera Fiend 

“Rather!” cried Lettice, the sister of three 
boys. 

“What kind of interest ?” 

“He wanted to go out there. It had just been 
talked about.” 

She looked at her father. 

“I wouldn’t let him go,” he said. “Why ?” 

“I want to know just how it came to be talked 
about.” 

“A fool of a doctor in town recommended it.” 

Lettice winced, but Thrush nodded as though 
that tallied. 

“ Did he recommend any particular vessel ? ” 

“Yes, a sailing ship—the Serin gap atam —an old 
East Indiaman they’ve turned into a kind of float¬ 
ing hospital. I wouldn’t hear of the beastly 
tub.” 

“Do you know when she was to sail ?” 

“I did know,” said Lettice. “I believe it was 
just about now.” 

“She sailed yesterday,” said Thrush impres¬ 
sively; “ and your brother, if it was your brother, 
talked a good deal about her to this man. He 
told him all about your having always been in 
favor of it, Miss Upton, and his father not. I’m 
bound to say it sounds as though it may have 
been the boy.” 


212 


A Likely Story 

Thrush seemed to be keeping something back; 
but the prime and absorbing question of identity 
prevented the others from noticing this. 

“It must have been!” cried Mr. Upton. “Who 
was the man, and where exactly did he see him ?” 

“ First on Thursday morning, and last on Thurs¬ 
day night. But perhaps Fd better tell you about 
my informant, since we’ve only his word for Thurs¬ 
day, and only his suspicions as to what has hap¬ 
pened since. In the first place he’s a semi-public 
man, though I don’t suppose you know his name. 
It’s Baumgartner—Dr. Otto Baumgartner—a 
German scientist of some distinction.” 

The ironmaster made a remark which did him 
little credit, and Thrush continued with some pride: 
“There was some luck in it, of course, for he was 
the very first man I struck who’d bought d’Au¬ 
vergne cigarettes since Wednesday; but I was on 
his doorstep well within twenty-four hours of hear¬ 
ing that your son was missing; and you may chalk 
that up to A. V. M.! I might have been with him 
some hours sooner still, but I preferred to spend 
them getting to know something about my man. 
I tried his nearest shops; perfect mines! One 
was a chemist, who didn’t know him by sight, 
and had never heard of the cigarettes, but re¬ 
membered being asked for them by an elderly 
213 


The Camera Fiend 


gentleman last Thursday morning! That abso¬ 
lutely confirmed my first suspicion that Baum¬ 
gartner himself was not the asthmatic; if he had 
been, the nearest chemist would have known all 
about him. Yet he had gone to the nearest chem¬ 
ist first! 

“The nearest butcher was next door; but he 
was so short about Baumgartner that I scented a 
true-green vegetarian. It was a false scent, Mr. 
Upton; not to mention the baker and the candle¬ 
stick-maker, there’s a little restaurant in the same 
row, which was about the fifth place where I began 
by asking if they knew where a Dr. Baumgartner 
lived in that neighborhood. The little Italian boss 
was all over me on the spot! The worthy doctor 
proved to be his most regular customer, having 
all his meals sent in hot from the restaurant in 
quite the Italian manner. I don’t suppose you 
see how very valuable this was to me. Germans 
love Italy, the little man explained; but I said that 
was the one point on which I should never yield 
to Germany—and I thought I was going to be 
kissed across the counter! It seems the good 
doctor lives alone with his niece (not always even 
her), and keeps no servants and never entertains. 
Yet on Friday, for the first time since the arrange¬ 
ment was made, the old chap went to the restau- 

214 


A Likely Story 

rant himself to complain of short commons; there 
had not been enough for them to eat on the Thurs¬ 
day night!” 

“Had they been alone ?” asked Mr. Upton, with 
a puzzled face. 

“That’s the whole point! My little Florentine 
understood they were, but I deduced one extra, 
and then conceived a course that may astonish you. 
It was the bold course; but it nearly always pays. 
I lunched at my leisure (an excellent Chianti my 
little friend keeps) and afterward went round and 
saw the doctor himself. The niece opened the 
door—I wish I’d seen more of her—but she fetched 
her uncle at once, and I begged for an interview 
on an urgent matter. He consented in a way that, 
I must say, impressed me very favorably; and the 
moment we were alone I said, ‘I want to know, 
Doctor, who you bought those asthma cigarettes 
for last Thursday!’ 

“That took him aback, but not unduly; so 
then I added, ‘I’m an inquiry agent with a very 
delicate case in hand, and if you’ll tell me it may 
solve as heart-breaking a mystery as I’ve ever 
handled.’ It was treating him like a gentleman, 
but I believe in that; there’s no shorter cut to 
whether a man is one or not. 

“Well, his face had lit up, and a very fine face 
215 


The Camera Fiend 


it is; it hadn’t blackened for the fifth of a second; 
and yet I had a disappointment in store. ‘I’d 
tell you his name with all my heart/ he said, ‘only 
I don’t really know it myself. He said it was 
John Green—but his handkerchiefs were marked 
“A. A. U.’”” 

“Tony’s initials!” cried Tony’s father. 

“But it never was Tony under a false name,” 
his sister vowed. “That settles it for me, Mr. 
Thrush.” 

“Not even if he’d got into some scrape or ad¬ 
venture, Miss Upton ?” 

“He would never give a name that wasn’t 
his.” 

“Suppose he felt he had disgraced his name?” 

“My brother Tony wouldn’t do it!” 

“He might feel he had ?” 

“He might,” the father agreed, “even if he’d 
done no such thing; in fact, he’s just the kind of 
boy who would take an exaggerated view of some 
things.” His mind went back to his last talk with 
Horace on the subject. 

“Or he might feel he was about to do some¬ 
thing, shall we say, unworthy of you all ? ” Thrush 
made the suggestion with much delicacy. 

“Then I don’t think he’d do it,” declared loyal 
Lettice. 


216 


A Likely Story 

“Let us hear what you think he did,” said Mr. 
Upton. 

“ It’s not what I think; it’s what this man Baum¬ 
gartner thinks, and his story that you ought to 
hear” 

And that which they now heard at second-hand 
was in fact a wonderfully true version—up to a 
point of poor Pocket’s condition and adventures— 
with the sleep-walking and the shooting left out— 
from the early morning of his meeting with Baum¬ 
gartner until the late afternoon of that day. 

Baumgartner had actually described the boy’s 
long sleep in his chair; it was with the conversation 
when he awoke that the creative work began in 
earnest. 

“That’s a good man!” said Mr. Upton, with 
unimaginable irony. “I’d like to take him by 
the hand—and those infernal Knaggses by the 
scruff of their dirty necks—and that old hag Har- 
bottle by the hair! ” 

“I think of dear darling Tony,” said Lettice, 
in acute distress, “ lying out all night with asthma 
—it was enough to kill him—or to send him out 
of his mind.” 

“I wonder if it could have done that,” re¬ 
marked Thrush, in a tone of serious speculation 
which he was instantly called upon to explain. 
217 


The Camera Fiend 


“What are you keeping back?” cried Lettice, 
the first to see that he had been keeping some¬ 
thing all this time. 

“Only something he’d kept back from them,” 
replied Thrush, with just a little less than his 
usual aplomb. “It was a surprise he sprang on 
them after waking; it will probably surprise you 
still more, Mr. Upton. You may not believe it. 
I’m not certain that I do myself. In the morning 
he had spoken of the Australian voyage as though 
you’d opposed it, but withdrawn your opposition 
—one moment, if you don’t mind! In the even¬ 
ing he suddenly explained that he was actually 
sailing in the Seringapatam, that his baggage was 
already on board, and he must get aboard himself 
that night!” 

“I don’t believe it, Thrush.” 

“No more do I, father, for a single instant. 
Tony, of all people!” 

Thrush looked from one to the other with a 
somewhat disingenuous eye. “I don’t say I alto¬ 
gether accept it myself; that’s why I kept it to the 
end,” he explained. “But we must balance the 
possibilities against the improbabilities, never los¬ 
ing sight of the one incontestable fact that the 
boy has undoubtedly disappeared. And here’s a 
man, a well-known man, who makes no secret of 
218 


A Likely Story 

the fact that he found him wandering in the Park 
in the early morning, breathless and dazed, and 
drove him home to his own house, where the boy 
spent the day; they took a hansom, the doctor 
tells me, than which no statement is more quickly 
and easily checked. Are we to believe this appar¬ 
ently unimpeachable and disinterested witness, or 
are we not ? He was most explicit about every¬ 
thing, offering to show me exactly where he found 
the boy, and never the least bit vague or unsatis¬ 
factory in any way. If you are prepared to believe 
him, if only for the sake of argument, you may 
care to hear Dr. Baumgartner’s theory as to what 
has happened.” 

Lettice shook her head in scorn, but Mr. Upton 
observed, “Well, we may as well hear what the 
fellow had to say to you; we must be grateful to 
him for taking pity on our boy, and he was the 
last who saw him; he may have seen something 
that we shouldn’t guess.” 

“Exactly!” exclaimed Eugene Thrush; “he saw, 
or at any rate he now thinks he saw, enough to 
build up a pretty definite theory on the foundation 
of facts supplied by me. He didn’t know the boy 
had come up to see a doctor and been refused a 
lodging for the night; he understood he had come 
up to join his ship, and suspected he had been on 
219 


The Camera Fiend 


a sort of mild spree—if Miss Upton will forgive 
me!” And he turned deferential lenses on the 
indignant girl. 

“I don’t forgive the suggestion,” said she; “but 
it isn’t yours, Mr. Thrush, so please go on.” 

“It’s an idea that Dr. Baumgartner continues 
to hold in spite of all I was able to tell him, and 
we musn’t forget, as Mr. Upton says, that he was 
the last to see your brother. Briefly, he believes 
the boy did meet with some misadventure that 
night in town; that he had been ill-treated or intim¬ 
idated by some unscrupulous person or persons; 
perhaps threatened with blackmail; at any rate 
imbued with the conviction that he is not more 
sinned against than sinning. That, I think, is 
only what one expects of these very conscientious 
characters, particularly in youth; he was taking 
something or somebody a thousand-fold more seri¬ 
ously than a grown man would have done. Afraid 
to go back to school for fear of expulsion, ashamed 
to show his face at home! What’s to be done ? He 
thinks of the ship about to sail, the ship he hoped 
to sail in, and in his desperation he determines to 
sail in her still—even if he has to stow away!” 

“My God!” cried Mr. Upton, “he’s just the 
one to think of it. His head was full of those 
trashy adventure stories!” 

220 


A Likely Story 

But Lettice shook hers quietly. 

“To think of it, but not to do it,” said she, with 
a quiet conviction that rather nettled Mr. Thrush. 

“But really, Miss Upton, he must have done 
something, you know! And he actually talked 
to Dr. Baumgartner about this; not of doing it 
himself, but of stowaways in general, a propos of 
his voyage; and how many pounds of biscuit and 
how many ounces of water would carry one alive 
into blue water. There’s another thing, by the 
way! He told Baumgartner the ship touched no¬ 
where between the East India Docks and Mel¬ 
bourne; he would be out of the world for three 
whole months.” 

“And she only sailed yesterday?” cried Mr. 
Upton, coming furiously to his feet. “And you 
let her get through the Straits of Dover and out 
to sea while you came down here to tell me this 
by inches ?” 

Thrush blinked blandly through his port-hole 

glasses. 

“I’m letting her go as far as Plymouth,” said 
he, “where one or both of us will board her to¬ 
morrow if she’s up to time!” 

“You said she didn’t touch anywhere between 
the docks and Melbourne?” 

“No; your son said that, Mr. Upton, and it 
221 


The Camera Fiend 


was his one mistake. They don’t usually touch, 
but a son of one of the owners happens to have 
gone round in the ship to Plymouth for the trip. 
I got it first from an old boatswain of the line 
who’s caretaker at the office, and the only man 
there, of course, yesterday afternoon; but I’ve 
since bearded one of the partners at his place 
down the river, and had the statement confirmed 
and amplified. One or two passengers are only 
going aboard at Plymouth, so she certainly won’t 
sail again before to-morrow noon, even if she’s 
there by then. You will be in ample time to 
board her—and I’ve got a sort of search-warrant 
from the partner I saw—if you go down by the 
12.15 from Paddington to-night.” 

The ironmaster asked no more questions; that 
was good enough for him, he said, and went off 
to tell a last lie to his wife, with the increasing 
confidence of one gradually mastering the difficul¬ 
ties of an uncongenial game. He felt also that a 
happy issue was in sight, and after that he could 
tell the truth and liberate his soul. He was pa¬ 
thetically sanguine of the solution vicariously pro¬ 
pounded by Eugene Thrush, and prepared to re¬ 
joice in a discovery which would have filled him 
with dismay and chagrin if he had not been sub¬ 
consciously prepared for something worse. It 
222 


A Likely Story 

never occurred to Mr. Upton to question the man’s 
own belief in the theory he had advanced; but 
Lettice did so the moment she had the visitor to 
herself in the smoking-room, where it fell to her 
to do certain honors vice Horace, luckily engaged 
at the works. 

“And do you believe this astounding theory, 
Mr. Thrush ?” 

Thrush eyed her over his tumbler’s rim, but 
completed his draught before replying. 

“ It’s not my province to believe or to disbelieve, 
Miss Upton; my job is to prove things one way or 
the other.” 

“Then I’ll tell you just one thing for your guid¬ 
ance: my brother is absolutely incapable of the 
conduct you ascribe to him between you.” 

Thrush did not look as though he were being 
guided by anybody or anything, beyond the dictates 
of his own appetites, as he sat by the window of 
the restaurant car, guzzling new potatoes and such 
Burgundy as could be had in a train. But he was 
noticeably less garrulous than usual, and his com¬ 
panion also had very little to say until the train 
was held up inexplicably outside Willesden, when 
he began to fume. 

“I never knew such a thing on this line before,” 
he complained; “it’s all the harder luck, for I 
223 



The Camera Fiend 


never was on such an errand before, and it’ll 
just make the difference to me.” 

“You’ll have time,” said Thrush, consulting 
his watch as the train showed signs of life at last. 

“Not for what I want to do,” said Mr. Upton 
firmly. “I want to shake that man’s hand, and 
to hear from his own lips about my boy!” 

“I’m not sure that you’ll find him at home,” 
Thrush said, after a contemplative pause. 

“I’ll take my chance of that.” 

“He said something about their both going 
out of town to-day—meaning niece and self. I 
heard her playing just before I left, and that 
seemed to remind him of it.” 

“Well, Thrush, I mean to risk it.” 

“And losing the train ?” 

“I can motor down to Plymouth; there’s plenty 
of time. I might take him with me, as well as 
you ?” 

“ Better,” said Thrush, after another slight pause. 
“I’d rather you didn’t count on me for that trip, 
Mr. Upton.” 

“Not count on you ?” 

“One of us will be quite enough.” 

“Have you some other case to shove in front 
of mine, then?” cried the ironmaster, touched on 
the old raw spot. 


224 


A Likely Story 

“I shouldn’t put it like that, Mr. Upton.” 

“All right! I’ll take your man Mullins instead; 
but I’ll try my luck at that German doctor’s 
first,” he growled, determined to have his own 
way in something. 

“I’m afraid you can’t have Mullins,” said 
Thrush gently. 

“Want him yourself, do you?” 

“I do; but I’m afraid neither of us can have 
him just now, Mr. Upton.” 

“Why not? Where is he?” 

Thrush leant across as they swam into the 
lighted terminus. 

“In prison.” 

“In prison! Your man Mullins?” 

“Yes, Mr. Upton, he’s the man they arrested 
yesterday on suspicion of complicity in this Hyde 
Park affair!” 


225 


CHAPTER XVI 


Malingering 

P OCKET had put the fragments of his poor 
letter together again, and was still poring over 
those few detached and mutilated words, which 
were the very ones his tears had blotted, when 
there came a warning chink of tea-things on the 
stairs. He was just able to thrust the pieces back 
into his pocket, and to fling himself at full length 
on the bed, before Dr. Baumgarnter entered with 
a tray. 

“There, my young fellow! This will make a 
man of you! Then we shall see you yourself again 
by supper-time.” 

“I’m not coming down again,” said Pocket. 
“Don’t force me, please.” 

“Force you?” Baumgartner cocked a keen 
eye at the open window. “What a tyrant you 
would make me out! On the contrary, I think 
you show your wisdom in remaining quiet. Per¬ 
haps you would be quieter still with the window 
shut—so—and fastened to prevent it rattling. I 
226 


Malingering 

will open it when I come up again. There shall 
not be a sound in the house to disturb you.” 

And he took to tiptoes there and then, gliding 
about with a smiling stealth that set Pocket shiv¬ 
ering on the bed; he shivered the more when an 
admirable doctor’s hand, cool and smooth as steel, 
was laid upon his forehead. 

“A little fever, I’m afraid! I should get right 
into bed, if I were you. It’s nothing to be alarmed 
about, much less astonished; you have been through 
so much, my poor young fellow.” 

‘‘I have indeed!” cried Pocket, with unguarded 
bitterness. 

And Baumgartner paused between the foot of 
the bed and the door. 

“But there’s one consolation for you,” he said 
at length, in a sibilant whisper. “They’ve had 
that letter of yours at home quite a long time now 
—ever since yesterday morning, haven’t they?” 

The bed shook under Pocket when the door 
was shut—he only hoped it was not before. Up 
to the last minute, he felt quite sure that Dr. 
Baumgartner, suspicious as he was, had suspected 
nothing of the discovery downstairs behind his 
back. If he himself had betrayed anything it was 
in the last few seconds, when it had been all that 
he could do to keep from screaming out his knowl- 
227 


The Camera Fiend 


edge of the other’s trickery. To play such a trick 
upon a broken-hearted boy! To have the heart 
to play it! No wonder he felt feverish to that 
wicked hand; the wonder was that he had actually 
lain there listening to the smooth impostor gratui¬ 
tously revelling in his imposition! 

Rage and disappointment seized him by turns, 
and both together; at first they bit deeper even 
than the fear of Baumgartner—a fear felt from 
the beginning, and naturally redoubled now. 
Disappointment had the sharper tooth: his letter 
had never gone, not one of his people knew a thing 
about him yet, his tears had not drawn theirs, they 
had not hung in anxious conclave on his words! 
Not that he had recognized any such subtle con¬ 
solations as factors in his temporary and compara¬ 
tive peace of mind; now that they were gone, he 
could not have said what it was he missed; he only 
knew that he could least forgive Baumgartner for 
this sudden sense of cruel and crushing disappoint¬ 
ment. 

The phase passed, for the boy had the tem¬ 
perament that sees the other side eventually, and 
of course there was something to be said for the 
doctor’s stratagem. He could understand it, after 
all; the motive was not malevolent; it was to re¬ 
lieve his mind and keep him quiet. The plan 
228 


Malingering 

had succeeded perfectly, and nobody was really 
any the worse off. His people would have known 
he was alive and well on the Friday; but that 
was all, and they had no reason yet to assume 
his death. No; even Pocket came to see that 
his letter had been more of a relief to write than 
it could have been to read; that, indeed, it could 
only have aggravated the anxiety and suspense at 
home. Yet there was in him some fibre which 
the deliberate deception had fretted and frayed 
beyond reason or forgiveness. He saw all there 
was to be said about it; he could imagine Baum¬ 
gartner himself putting the case with irresistible 
logic, with characteristic plausibility, and all the 
mesmeric wisdom of a benevolent serpent; but 
for once, the boy felt, he would not be taken in. 
It was not coming to that, however, for he had 
quite decided not to betray his knowledge of the 
fraud—if only he had not already done so! 

His fears on that score were largely allayed by 
Baumgartner’s manner when at length he returned 
with another tray; for nothing could have been 
more considerate and sympathetic, and even fa¬ 
therly, than the doctor’s behavior then. Pocket 
had never touched his tea; he was very gently 
chidden for that. Obstinately he declared he did 
not want any supper either: it was true he did not 
229 


The Camera Fiend 

want to want any, or another bite of that man’s 
bread, but he was sorry as soon as the words were 
out. It was against his reasoned policy to show 
temper, and he was beginning to feel very hungry 
besides. The doctor said, “You’ll think better of 
that, my young fellow,” which turned a mere 
remark into more than half an absolute resolution. 
The second tray was set with a lighted candle on 
a chair by the bedside. The boy eyed it wistfully 
with set teeth, and Baumgartner eyed the boy. 

“Is there anything you could fancy, my young 
fellow ?” 

“Nothing to eat.” 

“Is there any book?” 

“Yes,” said Pocket, without a moment’s pre¬ 
meditation. “There’s the book I was reading 
yesterday.” 

“What was that?” 

“Some Frenchman on hallucinations.” 

“So you were reading that book!” remarked 
the doctor, with detestable aplomb. “ I wondered 
who had taken it down. It is a poor book. I 
have destroyed it.” 

“I’m sorry,” said Pocket, and tried to look it 
rather than revolted. 

“I am not,” rejoined Baumgartner. “Even if 
it were a good book, it is no book for you at the 
230 


Malingering 

present time. It is morbid to dwell on what is 
done and over/* 

“ If it is over/’ murmured the boy. 

“It is over!” said Baumgartner fiercely. 

“Well,” said Pocket, “Fm glad I read what 
he’d got to say about somnambulism.” 

“Why?” 

Pocket did not say it was a satisfaction to have 
done anything in spite of such a despot as his 
questioner. But he did say it was a comfort to 
know that others besides himself had committed 
terrible deeds in their sleep. 

“But,” he added, “they always seem to have 
dreamt the dreadful thing as well. Now, the funny 
thing is that I remember nothing until the shot 
woke me and I found myself where you saw me.” 

“Fm glad you find it funny!” 

The sneer seemed strangely unworthy of a keen 
intelligence; the increased asperity of Baum¬ 
gartner’s manner, and his whole conduct about 
a harmless book, altogether inexplicable. 

“You know what I mean,” replied the boy with 
spirit. 

“Yes, I know what you mean! You mean to 
go out of your mind, and to do your best to drive 
me out of mine, for the sake of a technically human 
life less precious than the average dog’s!” 

231 


The Camera Fiend 


And, much as it puzzled him, there was certainly 
something more human about this sudden out¬ 
burst than in anything Dr. Baumgartner had said 
since the scene between them in the bedroom be¬ 
low. He even slammed the door behind him when 
he went. But Pocket preferred that novel exhibi¬ 
tion, for its very heat and violence, to the sleek 
and calculated solicitude of the doctor’s final visit, 
with pipe and candle, when the one by the bed¬ 
side had burnt down almost to the socket. 

“My young fellow!” he exclaimed in unctuous 
distress. “Not a bite eaten in all these hours! 
Do you know that it’s nearly midnight?” 

“I’m not hungry,” replied Pocket, lying glori¬ 
ously for once. “I told you I wasn’t well.” 

“You’ll be worse if you don’t force yourself to 
eat.” 

“I can’t help that.” 

“Well, well!” said the doctor, instead of the 
objurgation that seemed to tremble for an instant 
on his lips. He replaced between them the oval 
hook of clear amber enclosing the thin round one 
of black nicotine, and he puffed until the cruel 
carved face was hotter and more infuriate than 
ever, under the swirling smoke of mimic battle. 
To the boy it was all but a living face, and a vile 
one, capable of nameless atrocities; and the hard- 
232 


Malingering 

frozen face of Baumgartner was capable of look¬ 
ing on. 

“Well, well! If I am to have you ill on my 
hands it’s my own fault. I take the responsibility 
for everything that has happened since the very 
first moment we met. Remember that, my young 
fellow! I took the law into my own hands, and 
you I took into my own house for better or worse. 
You were worse then, remember, and yet I took 
you in! Is it not strange that your asthma has 
entirely left you under my roof? Does it not lead 
you to believe in me, my young fellow—to trust 
me perhaps more than you have done?” 

It did not. Pocket was not going to lie about 
that; he held his tongue stubbornly instead. He 
still believed in his own explanation, derived from 
one of his many doctors, and moreover already 
mentioned to this one, of the sudden cessation 
of his chronic complaint. He hated Baumgartner 
for forgetting that, and pretending for a moment 
to take any credit to himself. That again was 
not worthy of so cool and keen a brain, much less 
of the candid character with which Pocket had 
supposed himself to be dealing. The very young 
are pathetically apt to see their own virtues in 
those whom they trust at all; but the school-boy’s 
faith in Dr. Baumgartner had been shattered to 
233 


The Camera Fiend 


its base; and now (as sure a symptom of his youth) 
he could see no virtue at all. 

“You must trust me again,” said Baumgartner, 
as though he knew what he had forfeited. “I 
know what will do you good.” 

“What ?” asked Pocket, out of mere incredulous 
curiosity. 

“Fresh air; some exercise; a glimpse of the 
beautiful town we live in, before another soul is 
about, before the sun itself is up!” 

Pocket hardly knew what made him shudder 
at the proposition. It might have been the poig¬ 
nant picture of that other early morning, which 
came before him in a scorching flash. But there 
was something also in the way the doctor was 
bending over him in bed, holding his pipe nearer 
still, so that the two dreadful faces seemed of equal 
size. And Baumgartner’s had become a dreadful 
face in the boy’s eyes now; there was none among 
those cruel waxworks to match it in cold intellect¬ 
ual cruelty; and its smile—its new and strange 
smile it must have been that made him shudder 
and shake his head. 

“But, my young fellow,” urged the doctor, “it 
will do you so much good. And not a soul will 
see us so early, early in the morning!” 

Again that insinuating smile inspired a horror 
234 


Malingering 

of which the boy himself could have offered no 
satisfactory explanation, especially as there was 
much to commend the proposal to his mind. But 
his face was white enough as he moved it from 
side to side on the pillow. 

“I tell you I’m ill,” he whimpered. “How can 
I go out with you, when you see I can’t eat a 
bite?” 

Baumgartner gave it up for the night. He was 
coming back in the early, early lovely summer’s 
morning; then they would see, would they not? 
Pocket had a last wave from the hideous meer¬ 
schaum head, and a nod from the other. He was 
alone for the night. And he meant to be alone 
next morning when the doctor took his early walk; 
let him prowl by himself. Pocket was not going 
with him. He had never been more determined 
about anything than that. It was an animal in¬ 
stinct of fear and deep revulsion, an impulse quite 
distinct from a further determination to slip away 
in his turn as soon as the coast was clear. On 
this course he was equally decided, but on other 
and more palpable grounds. Baumgartner had 
broken his side of their treaty, so the treaty was 
torn up with the letter which had never gone. 
And Pocket was going instead of his letter—going 
straight to his people to tell them all, and have 
235 


The Camera Fiend 

that poor innocent man set free before the day 
was out. 

The night’s immunity was meanwhile doubly 
precious; but it had been secured, or rather its 
continuance could only be assured, at a price which 
he wondered even now if he could pay. He was 
a growing, hungry boy, no longer ailing in wind 
or limb. Distress of mind was his one* remaining 
ill; the rest was sham; and distress of mind did 
not prevent him from feeling ravenous after fasting 
ten or eleven hours. Here was food still within 
his reach, even at his side; but he felt committed 
to his declaration that he could not eat. If the 
tray were still untouched in the morning, surely 
there could be no further question of his going out 
with Baumgartner; but there was an “if.” The 
boy was not used to being very stern with himself; 
his strongest point was not self-denial. Much of 
his moral stamina had been expended in nightly 
tussles for mere breath; he had grit enough there. 
But his temperament was self-indulgent, and that 
he triumphed over positive pangs only shows the 
power of that rival instinct not to accompany the 
doctor a yard from his door. 

Yet it meant more hours with the food beside 
him than he could endure lying still. He got up 
inch by inch, for he knew who lay underneath; and 
236 


Malingering 

he opened the window, which Baumgartner had 
broken his promise to open, by even slower 
and more laborious degrees. He leant out as he 
had done that first morning, it might have been a 
month ago; and this scene must have challenged 
comparison with that, had his mind been even as 
free from dread and terror as it had been then. 
But all he saw was the few remaining lighted 
windows in the backs of those other houses; he 
could not have sworn there was a moon. The 
moon poured no beam of comfort on his aching 
head; but the lighted windows were as the open 
eyes of honest men, who would not see him come 
to harm; and the last rumble in the streets was a 
faint but cheering chorus for lonely ears. 

Once a motor-horn blew a solo near at hand, 
and Pocket half recognized its note; but he did 
not connect it with quite another set of sounds, 
which grew but gradually on his ear out of the 
bowels of the house. Somebody was knocking and 
ringing at the doctor’s door, not furiously, but 
with considerable pertinacity. Pocket was thrilled 
to the marrow just at first, and flew from the 
open window to the landing outside his door. The 
house was in perfect darkness, and still as death 
in the patient intervals between each measured 
attempt to rouse the inmates without disturbing 

237 


The Camera Fiend 


the street. It came to Pocket that it must be 
Baumgartner himself, gone out for something 
without his key; and the boy was about to run 
down and let him in, when he distinctly heard the 
retreat of feet down the front steps, and then a 
chuckle on the next landing as the doctor closed 
his bedroom door. 

Who could it have been ? Baumgartner’s chuckle 
suggested the police; but in that case it was the 
boy upstairs who was going to have the last laugh, 
though a grim one, and very terribly at his own 
expense. He could not close an eye for thinking 
of it, and listening for another knocking and ring¬ 
ing down below. But nothing happened until the 
doctor returned between five and six, still with his 
meerschaum pipe, still in his alpaca jacket, but 
wearing also the goblin hat and cloak of their first 
meeting, to renew and intensify the animal fear 
that glued the boy to his bed. 

“It is a pity,” said Baumgartner, standing at 
the window which Pocket had left open. “The 
air is like champagne at this hour, and not a cloud 
in the sky! It would do you more good than lying 
there. It is you who are making yourself ill. If 
I thought you were doing it on purpose”—and 
his eyes blazed—“I’d feed you like a fowl!” 

“It’s so likely that I should do it on purpose,” 
238 


Malingering 

muttered Pocket, with school-boy sarcasm. His 
eyes, however, were purposely closed, and they 
had missed the old daggers in Baumgartner’s. 

“You know best,” said the doctor. “But you 
are missing the morning of your life! Not a cloud 
in the sky, only the golden rain in my little garden. 
I suppose you have not learnt what the golden 
rain is at your public school ? You English call 
it laburnum; but we Germans have more imagi¬ 
nation, thank God!” 

Pocket did not open his eyes again till he had 
gone; next instant he had the door open too, and 
the doctor’s step was creaking down the lower 
flight of stairs. Once more Pocket ventured out 
upon the landing, not quite to the balusters; he 
trusted to his ears as before. They told him the 
doctor had gone into his dark-room. His heart 
sank. It was only for a moment. The dark¬ 
room door shut sharply. The steps came creak¬ 
ing back along the hall, went grating out upon 
the doorstep. There was another sharp shutting. 
Food at last! 

It was neither very nice nor half enough for a 
famishing lad, that plate of cold mixed meats from 
the restaurant, with a hard stale roll to eke them 
out. But Pocket felt he had a fresh start in life 
when he had eaten every crumb and emptied his 
239 


The Camera Fiend 


water-bottle. Nor was he without plan or purpose 
any longer; he was only doubtful whether to knock 
at Phillida’s door and shout good-by, or to leave 
her a note explaining all. Baumgartner would be 
out for hours; he always was, on these early jaunts 
of his; there would almost be time to wait and say 
good-by properly when the girl came down. She 
would hardly hinder him a second time, and he 
longed to see her and speak to her again, especially 
if that was to be the end between them. He did 
not mean it to be the end, by any means; but any 
nonsense that might have been gathering in the 
school-boy’s head was, at this point, more than 
rudely dispelled by the discovery that Dr. Baum¬ 
gartner had removed his clothes! 

Pocket swore an oath that would have shocked 
him in a school-fellow; it was a practice he indeed 
abhorred, but decent words would not meet such a 
case. It was to be met by action, however, just 
as that locked door had been met, and the police¬ 
man’s prohibition in the Park. He knew where 
his clothes must be. He slipped his overcoat, 
which he was using as a dressing-gown, over his 
pajamas, and ran right downstairs as Dr. Baum¬ 
gartner had done not many minutes before him. 
His clothes were in the dark-room. But the dark¬ 
room door had a Yale lock; there was no forcing 
240 


Malingering 

it by foot or shoulder, though Pocket in his passion 
tried both. So round he went without a moment’s 
hesitation to the dark-room window by way of the 
little conservatory. The blind was drawn. That 
mattered nothing. He went back for a plant-pot, 
and smashed both it and a sheet of ruby glass with 
one vicious blow. 

Entry was simple after that; he had only to be 
careful not to cut his hands or feet. Inside, he 
removed the broken glass, closed the window, and 
let the blind down as he had found it, without 
looking twice at his clothes. There they were for 
him to carry upstairs at his leisure. They were 
not his only property in that room either. His re¬ 
volver was there somewhere under lock and key. 
He might want it, waking, if Dr. Baumgartner 
came back before his time. 

It was easily located; of the lockers, built in 
with the shelves on the folding doors, only one 
was actually locked, and the revolver was not in 
the others. Pocket went to his waistcoat for one 
of those knives beloved of school-boys, with the 
hook for extracting stones from hoofs, among other 
superfluous implements. Pocket had never used 
this one, had often felt inclined to wrench it off 
because it was hard to open and in the way of the 
other tools. But he used it now with as little 
241 


The Camera Fiend 


hesitation as he had done the other damage, with 
almost a lust for breakage; and there was his 
revolver, safe and sound as his clothes. 

It had been honored with a place beside a rack 
of special negatives; at least, there were other 
racks, in the other lockers, not locked up like that; 
and there was no other treasure that Pocket could 
see. He had his hand on his own treasure, was 
in the act of taking it, trembling a little, but more 
elated, as he stood in a ruby flood only partially 
diluted by the broken window behind the blind. 

At that moment there came such a thunder of 
knuckles on the door beside him that the revolver 
caught in the rack of negatives, and brought the 
whole lot crashing about his toes. 


242 


CHAPTER XVII 


On the Track of the Truth 

T HE unseen knuckles renewed their assault 
upon the dark-room door; and Pocket wa¬ 
vered between its Yale lock, which opened on 
this side with a mere twist of the handle, and the 
broken red window behind the drawn red blind. 
Escape that way was easy enough; and if ever one 
could take the streets in pajamas and overcoat, 
with the rest of one’s clothes in a bundle under 
one’s arm, it was before six o’clock in the morning. 
But it was not a course that vanity encouraged in 
an excited school-boy with romantic instincts and 
a revolver which he perceived at a glance to be 
still loaded in most of its chambers. Pocket was 
not one of nature’s heroes, but he had an over¬ 
whelming desire to behave like one, and time to 
feel how he should despise himself all his life if 
he bolted by the window instead of opening the 
door. So he did open it, trembling but deter¬ 
mined. And there stood Phillida in her dressing- 
gown, her dark hair tumbling over her shoulders. 
243 


The Camera Fiend 


"It’s you!” she cried, taking the exclamation 
out of his mouth. 

“Yes,” he said, with a gust of relief; “did you 
think it was thieves?” 

“Isn’t it?” she demanded, pointing to the 
broken window visible through the blind. Then 
she saw his revolver, and drew back an inch. 

“He took this from me,” said Pocket. “I had 
a right to it. Take it if you will!” 

And he offered it, in the best romantic manner, 
by the barrel. But Phillida was too angry to look 
at revolvers. 

“You had no business to break in to get it,” 
she told him, with considerable severity. 

“I didn’t! I broke in for my clothes; he took 
them, too, this morning before he went out. 
They’re what I broke in for, and I’d a perfect 
right; you know I had! And while I’m about it 
I thought I might as well have this thing, too. I 
knew it was in here somewhere. It was in there. 
And I’m glad I got it, and so should you be, 
because you and I are in the house of one of the 
greatest villains alive!” 

The words tumbled over each other with quite 
hereditary heat. They were all out in a few 
seconds, and the boy left panting with his indig¬ 
nation, the girl’s eyes flashing hers. 

244 



He offered it in the best romantic manner. 












On the Track of the Truth 

“I begin to think my uncle was right,” said she. 
“This is the act of what he said you were, if 
anything could be.” 

“He lied to you, and he’s been lying to me!” 

“He may have been justified.” 

“You wait till you hear all he’s done! I don’t 
mean taking my revolver from me; he was justified 
in that, if you like, after what I’d done with it. 
He may even have been justified in taking away 
my clothes, if he couldn’t trust me to keep my 
word and stay in this awful house. But that isn’t 
the worst. He encouraged me to write a letter 
home, to my own poor people who may think me 

dead-” 

“Well?” 

There was more sympathy in her voice, more 
anxiety; but his was breaking with his great grief 
and grievance. 

“He took it out himself, to send it to the General 
Post-Office to catch the country post. So he said; 
and I was so grateful to him! On Saturday morn¬ 
ing he said they must have got it; he kept on say¬ 
ing so, and you don’t know how thankful I was 
every time! But yesterday afternoon I found 
scraps of my letter in the waste-paper basket in 
his room; he’d never posted it at all!” 

Phillida looked shocked and distressed enough 

2 45 


The Camera Fiend 


at this; her liquid eyes filled with sympathy as 
they gazed upon the wretched youth. 

“I’m a fool to blub about it—but—but that was 
the Limit!” he croaked, and worked the poor 
word till it came distinctly. 

“It was cruel,” she allowed. “It must seem 
so, at any rate; it does to me; but then I under¬ 
stand so little. I can’t think why he’s hiding 
you, or why you let yourself be hidden.” 

“But you must know what I’ve done; you must 
guess ? ” 

The revolver was still in his hand; he gave it a 
guilty glance, and she looked from it to him with¬ 
out recoiling. 

“Of course I guessed on Saturday.” There 
was a studious absence of horror in her tone. 
“Yet I couldn’t believe it, unless it was an accident. 
And if it was an accident-” 

“It was one!” he choked. “It was the most 
absolute accident that ever happened; he saw it; 
he can tell you; but he never told me till hours 
afterward. I was nearly dead with asthma; he 
brought me here, he was frightfully good to me, 
I’m grateful enough for all that. But he should 
have told me before the accident became a crime! 
When he did tell me I lost my head, and begged 
him to keep me here, and afterward when I came 
246 


On the Track of the Truth 


to my senses he wouldn’t let me go. I needn’t 
remind you of that morning! After that I prom¬ 
ised to stay on, and I’d have kept all my promises 
if only my letter had gone to my poor people!” 

He told her what a guarded letter it had been, 
only written to let them know he was alive, and 
that with the doctor’s expressed approval. But 
now he had learnt his lesson, and he was going to 
play the game. It was more than ever the game 
with that poor fellow lying in prison for what he 
had never done. And so the whole story would 
be in to-morrow’s papers, with the single exception 
of Dr. Baumgartner’s name. 

“Nothing shall make me give that,” said Pocket 
valiantly; “on your account, if not on his!” 

Phillida encouraged his new resolution without 
comment on this last assurance. She had stooped, 
and was picking up the unbroken negatives and 
putting them back in the rack; he followed her 
example, and collected the broken bits, while she 
put the rack back in its place, and certain splinters 
in theirs, until the locker shut without showing 
much damage. Pocket was left with the frag¬ 
mentary negatives on his hands. 

“I should throw those away,” said Phillida. 
“And now, by the time you’re ready to go, I’ll 
have a cup of tea ready for you.” 

24 7 


The Camera Fiend 


They faced each other in the rosy light, now 
doubly diluted by the open door, and Pocket did 
not move. He wanted to say something first, and 
he was too shy to say it. Shyness had come upon 
him all at once; hitherto they had both been like 
young castaways, finely regardless of appearances, 
he of his bare feet and throat, she of her dressing- 
gown and her bedroom slippers. She was un¬ 
conscious or careless still, as with a brother; but 
he had become the very embodiment of mauvaise 
honte , an awful example of the awkward age; and 
it was all the fault of what he suddenly felt he 
simply must say.* 

“But—but I don’t want to leave you!” he 
blurted out at last. 

“But I want you to,” she returned promptly 
and firmly, though not without a faint smile. 

It was leaving her with a villain that he minded; 
but he could not get that out, except thus bluntly, 
nor could he denounce the doctor now as he had 
done when his blood was up. Besides, the man 
was a different man to his niece; all that redeemed 
him went out to her. Pocket did not think he was 
peculiar there; in fact, he thought romantically 
enough about the girl, with her dark hair all over 
her pink dressing-gown, and ivory insteps peeping 
out of those soft slippers; especially when the 
248 


On the Track of the Truth 

vision was lost forever, and he upstairs making 
himself as presentable as he could in a few minutes. 
But it seemed she was busy in the same way, and 
she took longer over it. He found the breakfast 
things on the table, the kettle on the gas-stove, 
but no Phillida to make the tea. He could not 
help wishing she would be quick; if he was going, 
the sooner he went the better, but he was terribly 
divided in his desires. He hated the thought of 
deserting a comrade, who was also a girl, and such 
a girl! He could only face it with the fixed in¬ 
tention of coming back to the rescue of his heroine, 
he the hero of their joint romance. But for his 
own immediate freedom he was already unheroi- 
cally eager. And yet he could deliberately fit the 
broken negatives together, on the white table-cloth, 
partly to pass the time, partly out of a boyish 
bravado which involved little real risk; for the 
doctor had not yet been gone an hour; and a loaded 
revolver is a loaded revolver, be it brandished by 
man or boy. 

The piecing of the plates was like a children’s 
puzzle, only easier, because the pieces were not 
many. One of the reconstructed negatives was 
of painful interest; it reminded Pocket of the fatal 
one smashed to atoms by Baumgartner in the pink 
porcelain trough. There were trees again, only 
leafless, and larger, and there was a larger figure 
249 


The Camera Fiend 


sprawling on a bench. Pocket felt he must have 
a print of this; he remembered having seen print¬ 
ing-frames and tubes of sensitized paper in the 
other room; and hardly had he filled his frame 
and placed it in position, than Phillida ran down¬ 
stairs, and he told her what he had done. 

“I wish you hadn’t/’ she said nervously, as 
she made mechanical preparations with pot and 
kettle. “It would only make matters worse if 
my uncle came in now.” 

“But he wasn’t back on Friday before ten or 
eleven.” 

“You never know!” 

Pocket spoke out with a truculence which his 
brothers had inherited, but not he, valiantly as 
he might try to follow a family example. 

“I don’t care! I can’t help it if he does come. 
I’ll tell him exactly what I’ve done, and why, and 
exactly what I’m going to do next. I give him 
leave to stop me if he can.” 

“I’m afraid he won’t wait for that. But I 
wish you had waited for his leave before printing 
his negative.” 

Pocket jumped up from table, and ran to the 
printing-frame in the sunny room at the back. 
He had been reminded of it only just in time. It 
was a rather dark print that he first examined, one 
half at a time, and then extracted from the frame. 

250 


On the Track of the Truth 

It was meshed with white veils, showing the joins 
of the broken plate. But it had been an excellent 
negative originally. And it was still good enough 
to hold Pocket rooted to the carpet in the sunny 
room, until Phillida came in after him, and stood 
looking over his shoulder. 

“I know that place!” said she at once. “It’s 
Holland Walk, in Kensington.” 

He turned to her quickly. 

“The place where there was a suicide or some¬ 
thing not long ago ?” 

“The very place!” exclaimed the girl, looking 
up from the darkening print. “I remember my 
uncle would take me to see it next day. He’s 
always so interested in mysteries. I’m sure that’s 
the very spot he showed me as the one where it 
must have happened.” 

“Did he take the photograph then ?” 

“No; he hadn’t his camera with him.” 

“Then this is the suicide, or whatever it was!” 
cried Pocket, in uncontrollable excitement. “It’s 
not only the place; it’s the thing itself. Look at 
that man on the bench!” 

The girl took a long look nearer the window. 

“How horrible!” she shuddered. “His head 
looks as though it were falling off! He might be 
dying.” 


251 


The Camera Fiend 


“Dying or dead,” said Pocket, “at the very 
second the plate was exposed!” 

She looked at him in blank horror. His own 
horror was no less apparent, but it was more 
understanding. He had Baumgartner’s own con¬ 
fession of his attempts to secure admission to 
hospital death-beds, even to executions; he ex¬ 
pounded Baumgartner on the whole subject, 
briefly, clumsily, inaccurately enough, and yet with 
a certain graphic power which brought those in¬ 
credible theories home to his companion as forcibly 
as Baumgartner himself had brought them home 
to Pocket. It was the first she had ever heard of 
them. But then he had never discussed his pho¬ 
tography with her, never showed her plate or print. 
That it was not merely a hobby, that he was an 
inventor, a pioneer, she had always felt, without 
dreaming in what direction or to what extent. 
Even now she seemed unable to grasp the full 
significance of the print from the broken negative; 
and when she would have examined it afresh, 
there was nothing to see; the June sunshine had 
done its work, and blotted out the repulsive picture 
even as she held it in her hands. 

“Then what do you think?” she asked at last; 
her voice was thin and strained with formless 
terrors. 

252 


On the Track of the Truth 

“l think that Dr. Baumgartner has the strangest 
power of any human being I ever heard of; he 
can make you do anything he likes, whether you 
like it yourself or not. The newspapers have 
been raking up this case in connection with— 
mine—and I see that one theory was that the man 
in this broken negative committed suicide. Well, 
if he did, I firmly believe that Dr. Baumgartner 
was there and willed him to do it!” 

“ He must have been there if he took the photo- 
graph.” 

“Is there another man alive who tries these 
things ? I’ve told you all he told me about it, but 
I haven’t told you all he said about the value of 
human life.” 

“Nor need you! He makes no secret of his 
opinion about that!” 

“Then put the two things together, and where 
do they lead you ? To these murders committed 
with the mad idea of taking the spirit in its flight 
from the flesh; that’s his own way of putting it, 
not mine.” 

“ But I thought your case was an accident pure 
and simple?” 

“On my part, certainly; but how do I know 
he couldn’t get more power over me in my sleep 
than at any other time ? He saw me walking in 
253 


The Camera Fiend 

my sleep with this wretched revolver. He said 
himself I’d given him the chance of a lifetime. 
You may be sure he meant before that poor man’s 
death, not after it.” 

“It isn’t possible,” declared Phillida, as though 
she had laid hold of one solid certainty in a sea of 
floating hypotheses. “And I know he hasn’t a 
pistol of his own,” she added, lest he should 
simplify his charge. 

But there they were agreed. 

“He hadn’t one on him that morning; that I 
can swear,” said Pocket, impartially disposing 
of the idea. “Mine was the only one in that cape 
of his, because I once jolly nearly had it out again 
when he came back into the room. There was 
nothing of the sort in his other coat, or any¬ 
where else about him, or I couldn’t have helped 
seeing it.” 

Phillida accepted this statement only too thank¬ 
fully. She beamed on the boy, as if in recognition 
of a piece of downright magnanimity toward an 
enemy whom she could now understand his regard¬ 
ing in that light. If only he would go before the 
enemy returned! If her uncle had such a power 
over him as he himself seemed to feel, then that 
was all the more reason for him to go quickly. 
But Pocket was not the man to get up and run 
254 


On the Track of the Truth 

like that. Perhaps he enjoyed displaying his 
bravery on the point, and keeping his companion 
on tenter-hooks on his account; at any rate he 
insisted on finishing his breakfast, and gave further 
free expression to the wildest surmises as he did 
so. And yet he was even then on the brink of a 
discovery which was some excuse for the wildest 
of them all, while it demanded a fresh solution of 
the whole affair. 

He had been fingering the recovered weapon in 
his pocket, almost fondling it, though with mingled 
feelings, as the Prodigal Son of his small posses¬ 
sions; suddenly it leapt out like a live thing in his 
hand, and clattered on the table between the girl 
and boy. It was a wonder neither of them was 
shot dead in his excitement. His whole face was 
altered; but so was his whole life. She could not 
understand his incoherent outburst; she only knew 
that he was twisting the chambers round and 
round under her nose, and that there appeared 
to be live cartridges in all six. 

“Don’t you see?” the words came pouring. 
“Not one of them’s been fired—it’s as I loaded it 
myself the other night! It can’t have been this 
revolver at all!” 

“But you must have known whether you fired 
or not ?” 


255 


The Camera Fiend 


“I tell you I was walking in my sleep till the row 
woke me. I’d only heard it once before, in a 
room. It sounded loud enough for the open air, 
though I do remember wondering I hadn’t felt any 
kick. But I was so dazed, and there was this 
beastly thing in my hand; and he took it from me 
in such a rage that of course I believed I’d let it 
off. But now I can see I can’t have done so. It 
wasn’t my revolver and it wasn’t me!” 

“Yet you say yourself my uncle didn’t carry 
one ? ” 

“I’ll swear he didn’t; but there’s another man 
in all this! There was the man they arrested on 
Saturday—the man I was so keen to set free.” 

The boy’s laugh grated; he was beside himself 
with righteous joy. What was it to him that his 
innocence implied another’s complicity ? Only 
too characteristically, he saw simply the central 
fact from his own point of view; but was it such 
an undoubted fact as he hot-headedly supposed ? 
There was the broken negative to confirm a certain 
suspicion, but that was not enough for Phillida. 

She asked if he had no more cartridges, and he 
said he had a few loose in his waistcoat pocket; 
he had thrown away the box. 

“Then my uncle might have put in a fresh one 
while you were asleep.” 

256 


On the Track of the Truth 

“Why should he?” 

“I don’t know, but it sounds quite as possible 
as the other.” 

“I’ll soon tell you if he did!” cried Pocket. 
“There were fourteen in the box to start with, 
because I counted them, and we only shot away 
one at the Knaggses’ before we were cobbed. 
That left thirteen—six in the revolver and seven 
in my pocket. There are your six, and here’s 
one, two, three, four—and three’s seven!” 

He swept them over the cloth like crumbs, for 
her to count them for herself, while he looked on 
with flaming cheeks and wagging tongue. He 
was beginning to see what it all meant now, but 
still only what it meant to him and his. He could 
look his people in the face again; that was the 
burden of his loud thanksgiving. He was as sure 
of his innocence as though the dead man had risen 
to prove it. 

“Very well,” said Phillida briskly; “then it’s 
all the more reason you should go this minute, and 
catch the very first train home.” 

And in her sudden anxiety to see him safely off*, 
she was for helping him on with the overcoat he 
had brought down again with his bag; but he 
followed her out slowly, and he would not turn 
his back. 


257 


The Camera Fiend 

“I can’t leave you now,” he said; and she knew 
that he saw it from her side at last. 

“Why not?” 

“Because the whole thing’s altered! I’m not 
going to leave you with a man like that!” 

So Pocket, without a moment’s thought either 
for her immediate feelings or the ultimate con¬ 
sequences to himself; and yet with an uncon¬ 
scious air of sacrifice more wounding than his 
actual words. She would have flung open the 
door and ordered him out, but he got his back 
to it first. So her big eyes blazed at him instead. 

“You’re very kind!” she cried. “But suppose 
I don’t believe a word you say against my uncle 
behind his back?” 

“I shall wait and say it to his face. That’s 
another reason for waiting.” 

“Do you think you’re the person to judge him 
—a boy like you?” 

“I don’t say I am. I only say that print-” 

“How do you know he took the negative ?” 

“I don’t, but-■” 

“But you jump to conclusions like a baby!” 
cried the girl, too quick for him in following up a 
confusing advantage. “I never heard anybody 
like you for flying from one wild notion to another; 
first you say he must have made you fire, though 
258 


On the Track of the Truth 

you own you were walking in your sleep with a 
loaded revolver, and then you’re sure you never 
fired at all, simply because you find the revolver 
fully loaded after days and days! Then you find 
a photograph that needn’t necessarily be what we 
thought it, that my uncle needn’t have taken even 
if it was; but you jump to another conclusion 
about him, and you dare to speak of him to me 
as though you knew every horrid thing you choose 
to think! As if you knew him and I didn’t! As 
if he hasn’t been kind and good to me for years 
and years—and kind to you—far too kind-” 

The strained voice broke, tears were running 
down her face, and in it and them there was more 
sincerity. Grief, and not anger, was the well of 
those bitter tears. And it was in simple suppli¬ 
cation, not imperiously any more, that she pointed 
to the door when speech failed her. 

The boy’s answer was to go close up to her 
instead. “Will you come with me?” he asked 
hoarsely. 

She shook her head; she was past surprise as 
well as indignation; she could only shake her head. 

“My people would be as good to you as ever 
he was,” urged Pocket extravagantly. “They’d 
understand, and you’d stay with us, Phillida! 
You might live with us altogether!” 

259 


The Camera Fiend 


She smiled very faintly at that. 

“Oh, Phillida, can’t you see that they’d do 
anything for you after all we’ve been through 
together? And I, oh! there’s nothing I wouldn’t 
do if only you’d come with me this minute! I 
know there’s a train about ten, and I know where 
we could borrow the money on the way. Come, 
Phillida, get on your things and come away from 
all this horror!” 

He had gone on, even into details, encouraged 
by the tolerance or apathy which had allowed him 
to go on at all. He took it for indecision; but, 
whatever it was, she shook it off and declared 
once for all that she would never leave Dr. Baum¬ 
gartner, even if everything was true about him, 
and he as mad as that would make him out. 

“But he is!” cried Pocket, with most eager 
conviction. “That’s the only possible explana¬ 
tion, and you’d believe it fast enough if you’d 
heard all he said to me that first night, and been 
with me in the dark-room when he developed his 
negative of the man he said I shot! You’d see 
how it all fits in, and how this other negative this 
morning simply shows he was at the bottom of 
that other affair as well! Of course he’s mad; but 
that’s the very reason why I can’t go and leave 
you with him.” 


260 


On the Track of the Truth 

“He would be as he’s always been to me.” 

“I believe he would,” said honest Pocket. 

“Then why don’t you go away and leave us ?” 

“Because I can’t.” 

“Because you won’t!” 

“Very well, because I won’t and never will! 
But, mind you, it’ll be your fault if anything 
happens to either of us after this!” 

He only meant it as a last argument, though 
he did resent her fatal obstinacy, and all the obli¬ 
gations which it imposed upon himself. He stood 
chained in fetters of her forging, as it were to the 
stake, but he was prepared to stand there like a 
man, and he did not deserve the things she said 
to him in a fresh paroxysm of unreasonable wrath. 
He might be a baby, but he was not a complete 
coward, or simply trying to make her miserable, 
as she declared; neither, on this occasion, was he 
thinking only of himself. But Phillida seemed 
suddenly to realize that, for she broke off with a 
desparing little cry, and ran sobbing up the stairs. 


CHAPTER XVIII 


A Third Case 

I N days to come, when the boy had schooled 
himself not to speak of these days, nor to 
let his mind dwell on their mystery and terror, 
it was as a day of dark hours and vivid moments 
that he remembered the one which Phillida and 
he began alone together in her uncle’s house. 
Those endless hours were either mercifully for¬ 
gotten or else contracted to an endurable mini¬ 
mum; but the unforgettable moments would light 
themselves up in his memory without a detail 
missing. 

There was their first encounter at the dark¬ 
room door, and Phillida standing all but bare¬ 
foot in the ruby light, with her glorious hair about 
her shoulders, a picture that could never fade. 
Then there was the moment of the incriminating 
print, which the sun wiped out even as Phillida 
stood with it in her hands. That moment merged 
itself in the greater one of his discovery that the 
revolver was fully loaded, his inspiration that 
262 


A Third Case 


neither it nor he had done the fatal mischief in 
the Park. Then she was begging him to go 
(she who would keep him the time before!) and 
he entreating her to come with him, and neither 
giving way an inch, so that they quarrelled just 
when they should have stuck together, and she 
ran away in tears, and he stayed below in a glow 
of anger which dissolved his fears like snow in May. 

That was the beginning of a black hour and 
more. Phillida was never to be forgiven, then; 
he was staying there at his peril, staying absolutely 
on her account, and so far from giving him the 
slightest credit for it, or a single word of encourage¬ 
ment, she said all sorts of things and was off before 
he could answer one of them. It was not for 
Pocket to see the many ironies of that moment, 
and not for him to recognize the tonic property 
of his heroic grievance. He could only see him¬ 
self at the foot of those stairs, first gnashing his 
teeth and not sorry he had made her cry, then 
sitting down with his eye on the front door, revolver 
in hand, to await the click of the doctor’s key. 
Another click was to answer it; and at the point 
of the cocked revolver Baumgartner was to have 
made a clean breast of his crimes, not only to 
the giant-killer at the foot of the stairs but to the 
girl he meant to call to witness with her own ears. 

263 


The Camera Fiend 


Pocket saw himself a desperate character just 
then, and one not incapable of desperate action 
had the climax only come at once. But he had 
more than an hour of it alone at his post; he had 
a whole hot forenoon of unmitigated suspense, of 
sickening alarms from tradesmen’s carts, boys 
whistling past the house as though they were not 
in a wicked world at all, and then a piano-organ 
that redoubled his watchfulness, and spoilt some 
tunes for him forever. Once he did hear sham¬ 
bling feet on the very steps outside. Once was 
quite enough, though it was but an advertisement 
for cast-off clothing (and false teeth) that came 
fluttering through the letter-box. Pocket was left 
in such a state that he would not have backed 
himself to hit the door from the stairs; and he put 
the chain on it, thinking to interview the doctor 
over that, in the manner of old Miss Harbottle. 

So it happened that the first significant sound 
was entirely lost upon him, because he was 
listening for one so much nearer at hand, until 
Phillida ran downstairs and almost over him 
where he sat. 

He got up to make way stiffly, but a glance as¬ 
sured him that the quarrel was over on her side. 
The great eyes were fixed appealingly upon him, 
but with a distressing look which he had done 
264 


A Third Case 


nothing to provoke. Not before then was he 
aware of another duet between newsboys coming 
nearer and nearer, and shouting each other down 
as they came. 

“You hear that?” she whispered, as if not to 
drown a note. 

“I do now.” 

“Do you hear what it is ?” 

Pocket listened, and caught a word he was not 
likely to miss. 

“Something fresh about the murder/’ said he 
grimly. 

“No; it’s another one,” she shuddered. “Can’t 
you hear ? 4 Another awful murder!’ Now they’re 
saying something else.” 

“It is something about the Park.” Pocket 
stuck to his idea. 

“And something else about some ‘well-known’ 
—I can’t hear what!” 

“No more can I.” 

“I’ll open the door.” 

She opened it on the chain as he had left it. 
That did not help them. The shouting had passed 
the end of their quiet road. It was dying away 
again in the distance. 

“I must go out and get one,” said Phillida. 
“Some well-known man!” 

265 


The Camera Fiend 


“You’re not thinking of the doctor, surely?” 

“I don’t know! I can’t think where he is.” 

“But you’re worse than I am, if you jump to 
that!” said Pocket, smiling to reassure her. He 
did not smile when she had run out as she was; 
he had shut the door after her, and he was waiting 
to open it in a fever of impatience. 

Dr. Baumgartner had left the house before six 
o’clock in the morning; now it was after twelve. 
If some tragedy had overtaken him in his turn, 
then there was an end to every terror, and for him 
a better end than he might meet with if he lived. 
The boy remembered Him who desireth not the 
death of a sinner, and was ashamed of his own 
thought; but that did not alter it. Unless his 
fears and his surmises were all equally unfounded, 
better for everybody, and best of all for Phillida, 
if this criminal maniac came to his end without 
public exposure of his crimes. Pocket may have 
misconceived his own attitude of mind, as his 
elders and betters do daily; he may have been 
thinking of his own skin more than he knew, or 
wanted to know. In that case he had his reward, 
for the murdered man was not Dr. Baumgartner. 
Phillida’s first words on returning were to that 
effect; and yet she trembled as though they were 
not the truth. 


266 


A Third Case 

“Who was it, then ?” the school-boy asked sus¬ 
piciously. 

“Sir Joseph Schelmerdine. ,, 

“So he was the well-known man!” 

He was well known even to the boy by name, 
but that was all. He had seen it in newspapers, 
and he thought he had heard it execrated by Baum¬ 
gartner himself in one of his little digs at England. 
Pocket was not sure about this, but he mentioned 
his impression, and Phillida nodded with swim¬ 
ming eyes. 

“Did the doctor know him ?” 

“Not personally; but he thought him a Euro¬ 
pean danger.” 

“Why?” 

“I can’t tell you. It was something to do with 
politics and gold-mines, and some financial paper. 
I never understood.” 

“May I see the paper you’ve brought in?” 

The girl held it tight in her hand, and tighter 
still as he held out his. 

“I’d rather you didn’t,” she said. 

“Then there’s something you haven’t told me.” 

“There is!” 

“I shall know it sooner or later.” 

“I know you will, and I know what you’ll 
think! You may think what you like, and still 
be wrong!” 


267 


The Camera Fiend 

There was a pause between the sentences, and 
in the pause the boy found the paper at his feet. 
There was no need to open it at the place; it was 
so folded already, the news standing out in its 
leaded type, and more of it in the late corner. 
Sir Joseph Schelmerdine, Bart., M. P., the well- 
known proprietor of the Money-maker , had been 
shot dead in front of his house in Park Lane. The 
murder had been committed in the early hours of 
the morning, before anybody was about except Sir 
Joseph and his groom, and the person whom the 
groom described as the only possible murderer. 
The man had just seen his master mounted for 
the early morning ride, and had left him in con¬ 
versation with a photographer representing himself 
as concerned with the press, and desirous of ob¬ 
taining an equestrian photograph for his paper. 
The groom thought it was to be taken in the Park, 
and was himself on his way back to the mews when 
the riderless horse overtook him. Mounting the 
animal, he had galloped round to find Sir Joseph 
dead in the road, and no trace of the “ photogra¬ 
pher ” but a false beard and spectacles which he 
had evidently discarded in his flight, and which 
unfortunately precluded a close description of his 
appearance. But a hue and cry had been started, 
and it was believed that the criminal was still in 
hiding in the immediate neighborhood, which was 
268 


A Third Case 


being subjected to a thorough search under the 
direction of responsible officers from Scotland 
Yard. 

Such was the news which the young girl had 
shrunk from showing to her companion. She had 
left him, indeed, to read it by himself. And the 
next thing he remembered was finding her quite 
insensible in the big chair in the back room. 

The afternoon was a blank broken by no more 
moments such as these. It was a period of dull 
misery and gnawing dread; but the pair saw each 
other through it, they were not divided any more. 
Now they listened for his step no longer, but for 
more newsboys crying his capture to the world. 
And in the hours that they spent thus listening, 
and listening, the girl had much to say, that it 
did her good to say, about this Dr. Baumgartner 
as she had known and almost loved him in the 
past. 

Lovable, however, he had never been, though 
more than good and kind to her for all that. He 
had never taken her into his life, or entered into 
hers, in the many years they had been more or 
less together. All she really knew of him was 
from her mother, whose elder sister he had mar¬ 
ried soon after the Franco-Prussian War, and lost 
soon after marriage. He must have been settled 
269 


The Camera Fiend 

in England many years before Phillida’s mother, 
herself an Englishman’s widow, came to keep 
house for him. The girl could not remember 
her father, but her mother had lived to see her in 
her teens, and in her lifetime Dr. Baumgartner 
had seemed much as other men. It was only of 
late years that he had withdrawn from a world in 
which he was justly honored, and buried him¬ 
self ever deeper in his books and his photographic 
experiments. His niece had never known any¬ 
thing of these; he had told her nothing, and she 
had always gone in awe of him. But he had sent 
her to school, he was going to send her to college, 
he had only just given her six months in Switzer¬ 
land. It was during those months that all his 
eccentricities had become pronounced; that he 
had given up servants, and taken to doing half the 
work of the house himself, with the casual aid of 
charwomen, and saving the other half by having 
the meals in from a restaurant. Phillida had no 
influence with him in these or any other matters. 
She only blamed herself for not having realized the 
change in him and done more to save him from 
himself. He had done so much for her, whatever 
madness might have overtaken him in the end; 
her own kinsfolk so much less, for all their opulent 
integrity. Nothing could make her forget what 
270 


A Third Case 


he had done. She never could or would desert 
him; it was no use asking her again; but she 
took her callow champion’s hand, and wrung it 
with her final answer, which was unaccompanied 
by further prayers for his departure. 

And Pocket could understand her now, though 
it was no consecutive tale that he heard, but a 
very chaos of excuses and extenuations, regrets, 
suppositions, and not always relevant recollec¬ 
tions, of which he had to make what he could in 
his own mind. What he made was a narrative 
so natural that he could not believe it was the life 
story of a murderer. His own convictions be¬ 
came preposterous in his own eyes. What had he 
been thinking about all day ? Was that the way 
a murderer would behave ? Was this the way a 
murderer would live, in these surroundings, with 
those books about him, with that little billiard- 
table in the next room ? Had those waxen mur¬ 
derers in the garish vault lived ordinary lives as 
well ? Pocket had only thought of them as com¬ 
mitting their dreadful deeds, yet now he could only 
think of Baumgartner as living this ordinary life. 

The mood passed, but it would recur as sure as 
Phillida thought of something else to be said for 
Dr. Baumgartner; it was the creature of her feeling 
for him, and of the school-boy’s feeling for her. 
271 


The Camera Fiend 


If he could have convicted himself of the fatal 
affair in the Park, and so cleared Baumgartner 
of all blood-guiltiness whatsoever, in that or any 
other case, he would have done it for Phillida’s 
sake that afternoon. But with every hour of the 
doctor’s absence suspicions multiplied. Phillida 
herself was a prey to them. She was almost as 
ready to recall symptoms of incipient insanity as 
instances of personal kindness; if one lost one’s 
reason, she broke a long silence to contend, there 
could be no question of regret and wrong. She 
was not so sure about crime and punishment. 
Pocket, of course, said there could be no question 
of that either; but in his heart he wondered how 
much method they must prove to hang a madman. 

The evening meal had been taken in, but that 
was all. The girl and boy had no thought of sit¬ 
ting down to it; she had made tea not long before; 
and strong excitement is its own meat and drink. 
They were sitting silently together in the room 
at the back. The scented summer dusk was 
deepening every minute. Suddenly there was a 
sound of small branches breaking in the garden. 
Pocket peeped out, standing back from the win¬ 
dow at her entreaty. 

The laburnum by the wall was shaking violently, 
pouring its golden rain into both gardens, and 
272 


A Third Case 


the bush beneath it looked alive; a tall figure rose 
out of it, and came creeping toward the little 
conservatory, bent double, and brushing the soil 
from his clothes as he advanced with long and 
stealthy strides. It was Dr. Baumgartner, in a 
cap pulled down over his eyes, and the old alpaca 
jacket. He had a newspaper parcel under his 
arm. 

The boy and girl were in the dark angle between 
the window and the door; but it was only com¬ 
parative darkness, and Baumgartner might have 
seen them; they were clasping hands as they shrank 
away from him with one accord. But he did not 
seem to see them at all. He stretched himself, as 
though he found it a relief to stand upright, and 
more mould trickled from his garments in the act; 
he took off the alpaca jacket, and shook it as one 
shakes a handkerchief. There could have been 
nothing in the pockets, certainly no weapon, and 
if he had a hip-pocket there was none in that, for 
his gaunt figure stood out plainly enough in the 
middle of the room. There was still the newspaper 
parcel; he had put it down on one of the walnut- 
tables. He now removed the paper; it fell at 
Pocket’s feet, a newspaper and nothing more; and 
nothing had come out of it but the stereoscopic 
camera, but that either watcher could detect. 

273 


The Camera Fiend 


And he passed through the room without taking 
the least notice of either of them, whether he saw 
them or not; and they heard him go upstairs and 
shut the door, and then his footsteps overhead. 

‘Til go up and tackle him at once,” said Pocket 
through his set teeth; but Phillida would not hear 
of it. 

“No! I must go first and see if there’s nothing 
I can get him; he mayn’t have had anything all 
day. There’s no need for you to come at all—I 
believe he’s forgotten all about us both!” 

“Not he!” whispered Pocket, as the door opened 
overhead. “Here he comes!” 

He could not help gripping his revolver as the 
stairs creaked again under Dr. Baumgartner; he 
had gripped it more than once already with the 
hand that was not holding Phillida’s. The doctor 
was coming down in a hurry, as though he had 
indeed forgotten something. But he passed the 
open drawing-room door; they saw him pass, jing¬ 
ling a bunch of keys, and never so much as glanc¬ 
ing in on the way. It was the dark-room door 
he opened. Now he would find out everything! 
They heard a match struck, and saw the faint light 
turn into a strong deep crimson glow. The door 
shut. The children stood listening in the dark. 

Running water and the chink of glass; the tap- 
274 


A Third Case 

ping of a stoppered bottle; the opening of the 
dark slide; these stages the younger photograper 
followed as though he were again looking on. 
Then there was a long period without a sound. 

“He’s developing now!” whispered Pocket, close 
to the folding-doors. He caught the sound of 
labored breathing on the other side. “There it 
is—there it is—there it is!” cried the doctor’s voice 
in mingled ecstasy and mad excitement. A deep 
sigh announced the blackening of the plate at 
the conclusion of the first process. A tap ran for 
a moment; interminable minutes ensued. “It’s 
gone! It’s gone again!” cried the wild voice, with 
a sob; “it’s gone, gone, gone like all the rest!” 

One listener waited for the passionate smashing 
of the negative as before; but that did not happen 
again; and then he wondered if it was being put 
straight into the rack with the others, if the dam¬ 
age to the locker had been discovered at last. He 
never knew. The door opened. The red glow 
showed for a moment in the passage, then went 
out. The door shut behind Baumgartner, and 
again he passed the drawing-room, a bent figure, 
without looking in. And the flagging step on the 
stairs bore no resemblance to the one which had 
come hurrying down not many minutes before. 

“I must go to him!” said Phillida in broken 

275 


The Camera Fiend 


undertones, and her grief communicated itself to 
the other young sympathetic soul, for all the base 
fears he had to fight alone. Personal safety, little 
as she might think of it, was the essence of her 
position as opposed to his; and he was of the type 
that thinks of everything. She left him listening 
breathless in the dark. And in the dark she found 
him when at length she returned to report the 
doctor busy writing at his desk; but a pin’s head 
of blue gas glimmered where there had been none 
before, and a paper which had been trodden under¬ 
foot now rustled in Pocket’s hand. 

“Does he know I’m here ?” he asked. 

“I don’t think so. We never mentioned you. 
I believe he’s forgotten your existence altogether; 
he began by looking at me as though he’d forgotten 
mine. He says he wants nothing except time to 
write. He seems so strange—so old!” 

Again the break in her voice and again the 
boyish sympathy in his. “I wonder if something 
would be any comfort to you ?” 

“I don’t think so. What is it ?” 

“Something I saw in the paper he brought in 
with him. I lit the gas while you were upstairs.” 

Phillida turned it out again without comment. 
“Nothing that you saw can make any difference 
to me,” she sighed. 


276 


A Third Case 


“Do you remember my saying there must be 
another man in these—mysteries ? ” 

“ I think I do. What difference does it make ? 
Besides, the man you meant is in prison.’’ 

“He isn’t!” 

“You said he was?” 

“He was let out early this morning! Let me 
light the gas while you read it for yourself.” 

But Phillida had no desire to read it for herself. 
“I doubt if there’s anything in that,” she said; 
“but what if there were? Does it make it any 
better if a man has an accomplice in his crimes ? 
If he’s guilty at all, it makes it all the worse.” 


277 


CHAPTER XIX 


The Fourth Case 

T HE boy and girl sat long and late in the open 
window at the back of the house. The 
room would have been in darkness but for a flood 
of moonlight pouring over them. The only light 
in the house was in the room above, and they only 
saw its glimmer on the garden when a casual cloud 
hid the moon; but once Pocket had crept out into 
the garden, to steal a look at the lighted window 
itself; and what he saw was the shadow of a huge 
bent head smoking a huge bent pipe, and dense 
clouds of shadow floating up the wall and over 
the ceiling. 

It seemed hours since they had heard footstep 
or other sound upstairs or anywhere. There had 
been a brisk interval—and then an end—of more 
or less distant hansom-bells and motor-horns. 
There was no longer even a certain minute inter¬ 
mittent trembling of trifles on the walnut-tables, 
to which Pocket had become subconsciously accus¬ 
tomed in that house, so that he noticed its absence 
278 


The Fourth Case 


more than the thing itself. It was as though the 
whole town was at rest, and the tunnels under the 
town, and every single soul above or below ground, 
but those two white faces in the moonlight, and 
perhaps one other overhead. 

Pocket wondered; it was so long since a single 
sound had come down to their ears. He wanted to 
steal out and look up again. Phillida was against 
it; perhaps she was wondering too. Pocket, as 
usual, saw what he did see so very vividly, in 
his mind’s eye, that he shivered and was asked if 
he felt cold. The whispered debate that followed 
was the longest conversation they had that night. 
The window was not shut as a result of it, but 
Pocket fetched his overcoat on tiptoe, and it just 
went over both their shoulders, when the chairs 
were drawn as near together as they would go. 

The ragged little garden was brimming over 
with moonlight from wall to wall. The unkempt 
grass looked pale and ghostly, like the skin of 
some monstrous wolf. The moon rolled high in 
the sky, and clouds flew above and below the moon, 
varying in pace as well. Yet it was a still night, 
and Pocket did not think that he had broken the 
stillness, until the door burst open behind them, 
and Baumgartner stood there, holding his lamp 
aloft. The wick was turned too high, the flame 
279 


The Camera Fiend 


ran up the chimney in the draught, and for an 
instant a demoniac face flared up behind it. Then 
the chimney cracked, and fell in a tinkling shower, 
and the doctor was seen whirling a naked tongue 
of fire about his head. The boy drew back as the 
lamp flew through the open window, within an 
inch of his nose, and crashed upon the path out¬ 
side. 

The trio stood without a word in the moonbeams; 
but the doctor was breathing hard through his 
teeth, like a man wrestling with himself; and at 
last he laughed sardonically as though he had won. 

“A lamp like that’s a dangerous thing,” said 
he, with a kind of forced solemnity and a shake 
of the head; “You never know what may happen 
when a lamp does that! I’m glad the window was 
open; it didn’t go very near my young fellow, I 
hope ?” 

And he took Pocket playfully by the ear, but 
pinched it so hard that the boy could have 
screamed with pain. 

“It would have served you right,” continued 
the doctor, before Pocket could find his tongue, 
“for sitting up so late, and keeping a young lady 
from her bed to bear you company. Come, 
Phillida! I shall have another word with you, 
young fellow.” 


280 



The lamp flew through the open window. 


























































































































































































. 




























The Fourth Case 

The two words to the girl were in a different 
key from all the rest. They were tolerant, con¬ 
ciliatory, tenderly persuasive. The rest was suavely 
sinister; it made her hesitate; but Pocket had the 
presence of mind to bid her a cheery good-night, 
and she went, closely followed by Baumgartner. 

Posted once more at the open door, the boy 
heard Baumgartner on the next flight, soothing and 
affectionate still, allaying her fears; and his own 
surged into his throat. He looked wildly about 
him, and an idea came. He opened the front 
door wide, and then stole back through the con¬ 
servatory into the moonlight. He heard Baum¬ 
gartner coming down before he gained the garden. 
He tore to the end of it, and cowered in the shadow 
of the far wall. 

The doctor came running into the moonlit room, 
but not for a minute; it looked as though he had 
run out first into the road. In the room he lit the 
gas, and Pocket saw him have a look in all the 
corners, but hardly the look of a seeker who expects 
to find. Some long moments he stood out horribly 
at the open window, gazing straight at the spot 
where the fugitive crouched a few inches out of the 
moonlight and hugged the revolver in his pocket. 
He seemed to see nothing to bring him out that 
way, for he closed that window and put out the 
281 


The Camera Fiend 


gas. The trembling watcher heard the front door 
shut soon after, and saw another light in Baum¬ 
gartner’s room the minute after that, and the blind 
drawn down. But on the blind there lagged a 
cloud-capped shadow till the doctor’s pipe was 
well in blast. 

There were no more shadows after that. The 
moon moved round to the right, and set behind 
the next house. The sky grew pale, and the light¬ 
ed blind paler still, until Baumgartner drew it up 
before putting out his light. Pocket was now too 
stiff to stir; but it was not necessary; the doctor 
had scarcely looked out. There was a twitter of 
sparrows all down the road, garden answering to 
garden. The sun came up behind Pocket’s wall, 
behind the taller houses further back. And Baum¬ 
gartner reappeared at his window for one instant 
in his cap. 

The front door shut again. 

Down the garden ran Pocket without the least 
precaution now. There was a gravel passage be¬ 
tween the tradesmen’s entrance, on the detached 
side of the house, and the garden wall. This pas¬ 
sage was closed by a gate, and the gate was locked, 
but Pocket threw himself over it almost in his 
stride and darted over into the open road. 

Just then it was a perfectly empty road, but for 
282 


The Fourth Case 


a gaunt black figure stalking away in the distance. 
An overwhelming curiosity urged the boy to follow, 
but an equal dread of detection kept him cowering 
in gate-ways, until Baumgartner took the turning 
past the shops without a backward glance. Pocket 
promptly raced to that corner, and got another 
glimpse of his leader before he vanished round the 
next. So the spasmodic chase continued over a 
zigzag course; but at every turn the distance 
between them was a little less. Neither looked 
round, and once the boy’s feet were actually on 
the man’s shadow; for half the streets were raked 
with level sunlight, but the other half were ladders 
of dusk with rungs of light at the gaps between the 
houses. All were dustier, dirtier, and emptier than 
is ever the case by night or day, because this was 
neither one nor the other, though the sun was 
up to make the most of dust, dirt, and emptiness. 
It was before even the cleansing hour of the scav¬ 
enger and the water-cart. A dead cat was spraw¬ 
ling horribly in one deserted reach of wood-paving. 
And a motor-car at full speed in a thoroughfare 
calling itself King’s Road, which Pocket was 
about to cross, had at all events the excuse of a 
visible mile of asphalt to itself. 

Pocket drew back to let it pass, without looking 
twice at the car itself, which indeed was disguised 
283 


The Camera Fiend 


out of knowledge in the promiscous mire of many 
counties; but the red eyes behind the drivers^ 
goggles were not so slow. Down went his feet on 
clutch and brake without a second’s interval; round 
spun the car in a skid that tore studs from the 
tires, and fetched her up against the curb with a 
shivered wheel. Pocket started forward with a cry; 
but at that moment a ponderous step fell close be¬ 
hind him; his arm was seized, and he was dragged 
in custody across the road. 

“Your boy, I think!” cried one whom he had 
never seen before, and did not now, being locked 
already in the motorist’s arms. 

“When did you find him?” the father aske’d 
when he was man enough, still patting Pocket’s 
shoulders as if he were a dog. 

“Only last night when I wired.” 

“And where?” 

“In the house where you and I couldn’t make 
ourselves heard.” 

The school-boy flared up through all his emo¬ 
tion. 

“Why I never saw you before this minute!” 

“Well, I’ve had my eye on you, more or less, for 
a day or two.” 

“Then why didn’t you wire before ?” demanded 
Mr. Upton, quite ready to mask his own emotion 
284 


The Fourth Case 

with a little heat. “I didn’t get it till after nine 
o’clock—too late for the evening train—but I 
wasn’t going to waste three hours with a forty- 
horser eating its head off*! So here I am, on my 
way to the address you gave.” 

“It was plumb opposite Baumgartner’s. I 
mounted guard there the very night you left. He 
came out twenty minutes ago, and your boy after 
him!” 

“But what does it all mean, Thrush? What 
on earth were you doing there, my dear boy ?” 

The notes of anger and affection were struck 
in ludicrously quick succession; but the first was 
repeated on the boy’s hang-dog admission that 
he had been hiding. 

“Hiding, Tony?” 

Thrush himself seemed surprised at the expres¬ 
sion. “But at all events we found you better 
employed,” he said to Pocket, “and the sooner we 
all take up the chase again the more chance we 
shall have of laying this rascal by the heels.” 

“Take it up, then!” snapped Mr. Upton. 
“Jump into the motor, and bring the brute to me 
when you’ve got him! I want to speak to my boy.” 

He did not realize the damage done to his car, 
or listen to a word that passed between Thrush and 
his chauffeur; he had eyes only for those of his 
285 


The Camera Fiend 


child who had been lost but was found, and not a 
thought in his head outside the story he extracted 
piecemeal on the spot. Poor Pocket told it very 
volubly and ill; he would not confine himself to 
simple facts. He stated his suspicion of Baum¬ 
gartner’s complicity in the Hyde Park affair as 
though he knew it for a fact; cited the murders in 
Holland Walk and Park Lane as obvious pieces 
of the same handiwork, and yet declared his con¬ 
viction that the actual hand was not Dr. Baum¬ 
gartner’s at all. 

“But why should you think he had an accom¬ 
plice, Tony ?” 

“He was unarmed the other morning. I’m 
quite positive of that. And his niece, who lives 
with him, has never seen a fire-arm of any kind 
in the house.” 

“Well, he’s villain enough to hang, if ever there 
was one! It’s time we laid hold of him. Where’s 
Mr. Thrush ? I thought you’d taken him on in 
the car ?” 

This to the chauffeur, now the centre of the 
carrion crowd that gathers about the body of any 
disabled motor. The chauffeur, a country-man 
like his master, was enjoying himself vastly with 
a surreptitious cigarette and sardonic mutterings 
on the cause of his scattered spokes; the facts be- 
286 


The Fourth Case 

ing that he had nearly fallen asleep at his wheel, 
which Mr. Upton had incontinently taken into 
his own less experienced hands. 

“The car won’t take anybody anywhere today,” 
explained the chauffeur, with his cigarette behind 
his back. “I shall have to get a lorry to take the 
car.” He held his head on one side suddenly. 
“There’s a bit o’ tire trouble for somebody!” he 
cried, grimly. 

Indeed, a sharp crack had come from the direc¬ 
tion of the river, not unlike the bursting of a heavy 
tire; but Pocket Upton did not think it was that. 
He caught his father’s arm, and whispered in his 
father’s ear, and they plunged together into a 
side street broader than the asphalt thoroughfare, 
but with scarcely a break in either phalanx of drab 
mediocre dwellings, and not a creature stirring 
except themselves and a few who followed. The 
hog’s back of a still more deserted bridge arched 
itself at the foot of the street, its suspension cables 
showing against the sky in foreshortened curves. 
As they ran a peculiarly shrill whistle cut the 
morning air like a streak of sound. 

“P’lice!” screamed one of those bringing up 
the rear, and they easily spurted past father and 
son, each already contending with his own infir¬ 
mity. Mr. Upton was dangerously scarlet in the 
287 


The Camera Fiend 


neck, and Pocket panting as he had not done for 
days. In sad labor they drew near the suspension 
bridge to a cresendo accompaniment on the police 
whistle. It was evidently being blown on the 
Embankment to the right of the bridge, and already 
with considerable effect. As the pair were about 
to pass an intermediate turning on the right, a 
constable flew across it on a parallel course, and 
they altered theirs with one accord. Pocket panted 
after the constable, and his father thundered after 
Pocket, into a narrow street debouching upon a 
fenced strip of greenery, not too dense to hide 
broad pavement and low parapet on its further 
side, with a strip of brown river beyond that, and 
a sky-line of warehouses on the Surrey shore. 

The narrow garden had not been opened for 
the day. There was a gate opposite the end of the 
road, another gate leading out on the Embank¬ 
ment opposite that. Between the two gates a 
grimy statue rose upon a granite pedestal, a medi¬ 
tative figure clad to the heels in some nonedscript 
garment, and gazing across the river as he sat 
with a number of discarded volumes under his 
chair. It was a peculiarly lifelike monument, 
which Pocket would have been just the boy to ap¬ 
preciate at any other time; even now it struck him 
for an instant, before his attention was attracted 
288 




The Fourth Case 

to the group of commonplace living people on the 
Embankment beyond the narrow garden. They 
were standing together on the far side of one of the 
fixed seats. There was the policeman who had 
blown the whistle, and a small but motley crew 
who had answered to the call. Conspicuous units 
were a gentleman in dressing-gown and pajamas, 
a couple of chimney-sweeps, and a laboring cyclist 
on his way to work. They had formed a circle 
about some hidden object on the ground; and long 
before the new-comers could run round and join 
them, the school-boy had steeled himself to look 
upon another murdered man. 

He was in no hurry to look; apart from a natural 
dread of death, which he had seen for the first 
time, and then unwittingly, only the other morning, 
it was the murderer and not his victim of whom 
the boy was thinking as he arrived last upon the 
scene. It was Dr. Baumgartner whom he half 
expected to see swimming the river or hiding among 
the bushes in the enclosed garden; for he was not 
one of the group on the Embankment; and how 
else could he have made his escape ? The point 
was being discussed as Pocket came into earshot; 
all he could see of the fallen man was the soles of 
his boots upright among living legs. 

“Is he dead ?” he asked of one of the chimney- 
289 


The Camera Fiend 


sweeps, who was detaching himself from the group 
with the air of a man who had seen the best of the 
fun. 

“Dead as an ’erring,” replied the sweep cheer¬ 
fully. “Sooicide in the usual stite o’ mind.” 

“Rats!” said the other sweep over a sooty shoul¬ 
der; “unless ’e shot ’isself first an’ swallered the 
shooter afterward! Some’un’s done ’im in.” 

Pocket set his teeth, and shouldered his way 
into the group. His father was already in the 
thick of it, talking to the stout man in spectacles, 
who had risen miraculously from the ground and 
was busy brushing his trouser-knees. Pocket 
forced himself on with much the same flutter he 
had taken into the Chamber of Horrors, but with 
an equal determination to look just once upon Dr. 
Baumgartner’s latest victim. A loud cry escaped 
him when he did look; for the murdered man, and 
not the murderer, was Dr. Baumgartner himself. 


290 


CHAPTER XX 


What the Thames Gave Up 

P HILLIDA was prepared for anything when 
she beheld a motor-car at the gate, and the 
escaped school-boy getting out with a grown man 
of shaggy and embarrassed aspect; but she was not 
prepared for the news they brought her. She was 
intensely shocked and shaken by it. Her grief 
and horror were not the less overwhelming for the 
shame and fear which they replaced in her mind. 
Yet she remained instinctively on her guard, and 
a passionate curiosity was the only emotion she 
permitted herself to express in words. 

“ But have they no idea who did it ? Are they 
quite sure he didn’t do it himself?” 

Mr. Upton broke through his heavy embarrass¬ 
ment with no little relief, to dispose of the question 
of suicide once and for all. 

“It’s the one thing they are sure about,” said 
he. “ In the first place no weapon was to be found, 
and we saw no sign of a camera either, though this 
boy tells me your uncle had his with him when he 
291 


The Camera Fiend 


went out. That’s more or less conclusive in itself. 
But there was a doctor on the spot before we left, 
and I heard him say the shot couldn’t have been 
fired at very close quarters, and that death must 
have been instantaneous. So it’s no more a suicide 
than the case in Park Lane yesterday or the one 
in Hyde Park last week; there’s evidently some 
maniac prowling about at dawn, and shooting 
down the first person he sees and then vanishing 
into thin air as maniacs seem to have a knack of 
doing more effectually than sane men. But the 
less we jump to conclusions about him—or any¬ 
body else—the better.” 

The girl was grateful for the covert sympathy of 
the last remark, and yet it startled her as an index 
of what must have passed already between father 
and son. It was a new humiliation that this big 
bluff man should know as much as the boy whom 
she had learnt to look upon as a comrade in calam¬ 
ity. Yet she could not expect it to be otherwise. 

“What must you think!” she cried, and her 
great eyes filled and fell again. “Oh! what must 
you think?” 

“ It’s no good thinking,” he rejoined, with almost 
a jovial kindness. “We’re all three on the edge 
of a mystery; we must see each other through 
before we think. Not that I’ve had time to hear 
292 


What the Thames Gave Up 

everything yet, but I own I can’t make head or 
tail of what I have heard. I’m not sure that I 
want to. I like a man’s secrets to die with him; 
it’s enough for me to have my boy back again, and 
to know that you stood by him as you did. It’s 
our turn to stand by you, my dear! He says it 
wasn’t your fault he didn’t come away long ago; 
and it shan’t be mine if you stay another hour 
alone in this haunted house. You’ve got to come 
straight back with us to our hotel.” 

They happened to be all three standing in the 
big back room, a haunted chamber if there was 
one in the house. With his battle-pictures on the 
walls, his tin of tobacco on the chimney-piece, 
and the scent of Latakia rising from the carpet, 
the whole room remained redolent of the murdered 
man; and the window still open, the two chairs 
near it as they had been overnight, and the lamp 
lying in fragments on the path outside, brought 
the last scene back to the boy’s mind in full and 
vivid detail. Yet the present one was in itself 
more desolate and depressing than any in which 
Dr. Baumgartner had figured. It might be that 
the constant menace of that portentous presence 
had thrown his simple middle-class surroundings, 
at the time, into a kind of reassuring relief. But 
it was the case that the morning had already 
293 


The Camera Fiend 


clouded over; the sunshine of the other mornings 
was sadly missing; and Phillida looked only too 
eager to fly from the scene, until she declared she 
never could. 

“But that’s absurd!” cried Mr. Upton bluntly. 
“I’m not going to leave a young girl like you alone 
in the day of battle, murder and sudden death! 
You needn’t necessarily come with us, as long as 
you don’t stay here. Have you no other relatives 
in London ?” 

“None anywhere that I know much about.” 

“That doesn’t matter. It’s time they knew 
more about you. I’ll hunt them up in the motor, 
if they’re anywhere within a hundred miles, but 
you simply must let me take their place mean¬ 
while.” 

He was a masterful man enough; it did not 
require the school-boy’s added supplications to 
bring about an eventual compromise. The idea 
had indeed been Pocket’s originally, but his father 
had taken it up more warmly than he could have 
hoped. It was decided that they should return 
to their hotel without Phillida, but to send the car 
back for her later in the morning, as it would take 
her some time to pack her things and leave the 
deserted house in some semblance of order. 

But her packing was a very small matter, and 
294 


What the Thames Gave Up 

she left it to the end; most of the time at her dis¬ 
posal was spent in a hurried investigation of the 
dead man’s effects, more especially of his store of 
negatives in the dark-room. The only incriminat¬ 
ing plates, however, were the one she had already 
seen on its discovery by Pocket the day before and 
another of a man lying in a heap in the middle of 
a road. This one had been put to dry openly in 
the rack, the wood of which was still moist from 
the process. Phillida only held it up to the light 
an instant, and then not only smashed both these 
negatives, but poured boiling water on the films 
and floated them down the sink. The bits of 
glass she put in the dust-bin with those of the 
broken lamp, and had hardly done so when the first 
policeman arrived to report the fatality. He was 
succeeded by a very superior office, who gained 
admittance and asked a number of questions con¬ 
cerning the deceased, but in a perfunctory manner 
that suggested few if any expectations from the 
replies. Neither functionary made any secret of 
his assumption that the latest murder was but 
another of the perfectly random series which had 
already thrilled the town, but on which no light 
was likely to be shed by the antecedents of the 
murdered men. A third official came to announce 
that the inquest was to be opened without delay, 
295 


The Camera Fiend 


at two o’clock that afternoon, and to request 
Phillida to accompany him to the mortuary for 
the formal identification of the deceased. 

That was a dread ordeal, and yet she expected 
a worse. She had steeled herself to look upon a 
debased image of the familiar face, and she found 
it startlingly ennobled and refined. Death had 
taken away nothing here, save the furrows of age 
and the fires of madness, and it had given back 
the look of fine courage and of sane integrity which 
the girl was just old enough to associate with the 
dead man’s prime. She was thankful to have seen 
him like this for the last time. She wished that all 
the world could see him as he was, so noble and 
so calm, for then nobody would ever suspect that 
which she herself would find it easier to disbelieve 
from this hour. 

“You do identify him, I suppose, miss?” the 
officer whispered, impressed by her strange stare. 

“Oh, yes!” said Phillida. “But he looks as I 
have not seen him look for years. There are 
worse things than death!” 

She said the same thing to Mr. Upton at lunch¬ 
eon in his private sitting-room at the hotel, where¬ 
upon he again assured her that he had no desire 
to know a dead man’s secrets. He had found 
his boy; that was quite enough for him, and he 
296 


What the Thames Gave Up 

was able to deliver himself the more freely on the 
subject since Pocket was not at table, but in bed 
making up for lost sleep. Not only had he suc¬ 
ceeded in finding his son, but he had found him 
without the aid of police or press, and so not more 
than a dozen people in the world knew that he had 
ever disappeared. Mr. Upton explained why he 
had deemed it essential to keep the matter from 
his wife’s ears, and added almost equally good 
reasons for continuing to hush it up on the boy’s 
account, if only it were possible to do so; but 
would it be possible for Phillida to exclude from 
her evidence at the inquest all mention of so recent 
a visitor at her uncle’s house ? Phillida promised 
to do her best, and it proved not only possible 
but easy. She was questioned as to the habits of 
the deceased so far as they explained his presence 
on the Embankment at such a very early hour, but 
that was all. Asked if she knew of a single person 
who could conceivably have born such a grudge 
against Dr. Baumgartner as to wish to take his 
life, the witness answered in the negative, and the 
coroner bowed as much as to say that of course 
they all knew the character of the murder, but he 
had put the question for form’s sake. The only 
one which caused her a moment’s hesitation arose 
from a previous answer, which connected the 
297 


The Camera Fiend 


doctor’s early ramblings with his hobby of instan¬ 
taneous photography. Had he his camera with 
him that morning ? Phillida thought so. Why ? 
Well, he always did take it out, and it certainly 
was not in the house. Mr. Upton wiped his fore¬ 
head, for he knew that his boy’s name had been on 
the tip of the witness’s tongue. And there was 
a sensation in court as well; for here at last was 
a bone for the detectives, who obtained a minute 
description of the missing camera, but grumbled 
openly that they had not heard of it before. 

“They never told me they hadn’t got it,” ex¬ 
plained Phillida to the coroner, who made her 
his courteous bow, and permitted her to leave the 
court on the conclusion of her evidence. 

On the stairs Mr. Upton paid her compliments 
that made her wince as much as the crude grip 
of his hand; but he was tact itself compared with 
his friend Mr. Thrush, who sought an interview 
in order to ply the poor girl there and then with 
far more searching questions than she had been 
required to answer upon oath. She could only 
look at Mr. Upton in a way that secured his pep¬ 
pery intervention in a moment. The two men 
had scarcely seen each other since the morning, 
and the ironmaster thought they had enough to 
say to each other without bothering Miss Platts 

298 


What the Thames Gave Up 

just then; they accordingly adjourned to Glass¬ 
house Street, and Phillida was to have gone on 
to the hotel; but she made them drop her at a shop 
near Sloane Square on the pretext of seeing about 
her mourning. 

Phillida had promised to drive straight back 
to Trafalgar Square and order tea for herself if 
Tony had not appeared; but she did not drive 
straight back. She had a curious desire to see the 
place where the murder had been committed. It 
had come upon her at the inquest, while listening 
to the constable who had found the body, her 
predecessor in the witness-box. She had failed to 
follow his evidence. He had described that por¬ 
tion of his beat which had brought him almost 
on the scene of the murder, almost at the moment 
of its commission. It included only the short 
section of Cheyne Walk between Oakley Street 
and Cheyne Row. The houses at this point are 
divided from the Embankment by the narrow 
garden which contains the Carlyle statue. He 
had turned up Cheyne Row, at the back of the 
statue, but before turning he had noticed a man 
on the seat facing the river, on the far side of the 
garden. The man was sitting down, but he was 
said to have turned round and watched the police¬ 
man as he passed along Cheyne Walk. There 
299 


The Camera Fiend 


might have been a second man lying on that seat, 
or crouching on the flags between the seat and 
the parapet, but he would have been invisible 
from the beat. Not another creature was in sight 
anywhere. Yet the policeman swore that he had 
not proceeded a dozen yards up Cheyne Row 
before the shot was fired. He had turned round 
actually in time to see the puff of smoke dispersing 
over the parapet. It was all he saw. He had 
found the deceased lying in a heap, nearer the seat 
than the parapet, but between the two. Not 
another soul did he* see, or had he seen. And he 
had not neglected to look over the parapet into 
the river, and along the foreshore in both direc¬ 
tions, without discovering sign or trace of human 
being. 

Such was the story which Phillida found so 
hard to credit that she proceeded to the spot in or¬ 
der to go over the ground for her own satisfac¬ 
tion. This did not make it easier to understand. 
It had come on to rain heavily while she was in 
the shop; the shining Embankment was again 
practically deserted, and she was able to carry out 
her experiment without exciting observation. She 
took a dozen steps up Cheyne Row, pretended she 
heard the shot, turned sharp round, and quite 
realized that from where she was the body could 
3 00 


What the Thames Gave Up 

not have been seen, hidden as it must have been 
by the seat, which itself was almost hidden by 
the long and narrow island of enclosed garden. 
But a running man could have been seen through 
the garden, even if he stooped as he ran, and the 
murderer must have run like the wind to get 
away as he had done. The gates through the gar¬ 
den, back and front of the statue, had not been 
opened for the day when the murder took place, 
so Phillida in her turn made a half-circuit of the 
island to get to the spot where the body had been 
found, but without taking her eyes off the spot 
until she reached it. No! It was as she had 
thought all along; by nothing short of a miracle 
could the assassin have escaped observation if the 
policeman had eyes in his head and had acted as 
he swore he had done. He might have dashed in¬ 
to the garden, when the policeman was at his fur¬ 
thest point distant, if the gates had been open as 
they were now; but they had been locked, and he 
could not have scaled them unobserved. Neither 
would it have been possible to take a header into 
the river with the foreshore as described by the 
same witness. Yet the murderer had either done 
one of these things, or the flags of the Embank¬ 
ment had opened and swallowed him. 

The girl stood on the very spot where the 

3 01 


The Camera Fiend 


murdered man must have fallen, and in her utter 
perplexity it was no longer the tragedy but the 
problem which engrossed her mind. What had 
happened, had happened; but how could it have 
happened ? She raised her umbrella and peered 
through the rain at a red pile of many-windowed 
flats; had that Argus of the hundred eyes been 
sleeping without one of them open at the time ? 
Her own eyes fell as far as the black statue in the 
narrow garden, standing out in the rain, like the 
greenery about its granite base, as though the 
blackened bronze were polished marble. How life¬ 
like the colossal scholar in his homely garb! How 
scornful and how shrewd the fixed eternal gaze 
across his own old Father Thames! It assumed 
another character as the girl gazed in her turn, 
she seemed to intercept that stony stare, to distract 
it from the river to herself, and to her fevered 
fancy the grim lips smiled contemptuously on her 
and her quandary. He knew —he knew—those 
grim old eyes had seen it all, and still they stared 
and smiled as much as to say: “You are looking 
the wrong way! Look where I am looking; that 
way lies the truth you are poor fool enough to 
want to know.” 

And Phillida turned her back toward the shiny 
statue, and looked over the wet parapet, almost 
302 


What the Thames Gave Up 

expecting to see something, but never dreaming 
of what she actually saw. The tide, which must 
have been coming in that early morning, was now 
going out, and between the Embankment masonry 
and the river there was again a draggled ribbon of 
shelving foreshore, black as on some volcanic coast; 
and between land and water, at a point that would 
necessarily have been submerged for the last eight 
or nine hours, a small object was being laid more 
bare by every receding wavelet. It was black and 
square, perhaps the size of two large cigar-boxes 
side by side; and it had one long, thin, reddish 
tentacle, finishing in a bulb that moved about 
gently in the rain-pocked water. 

Phillida felt the parapet strike cold and wet 
through her rain-coat sleeves as she leant far over 
to make doubly sure what the object was; but 
indeed she had not a moment’s doubt but that it 
was the missing camera of the murdered man. 


3°3 


CHAPTER XXI 


After the Fair 

M R. UPTON was dumbfoundered when the 
top-floor door in Glasshouse Street was 
opened before Eugene Thrush could insert his 
key; for it was the sombre Mullins who admitted 
the gentleman as though nothing had happened to 
him except a fairly recent shave. 

“I thought he was in prison?” exclaimed the 
ironmaster when the two were closeted. 

“Do you ever read your paper?” 

“I haven’t looked at one since Plymouth.” 
“Well, I howked him out first thing yesterday 
morning.” 

“Ton did, Thrush?” 

“Why not ? I have need of the fellow, and that 
part of the game was up.” 

Mr. Upton showed symptoms of his old irrita¬ 
bility under the Thrush mannerism. 

“My good fellow, I wish to goodness you’d 
explain yourself!” 

“If I cared to be profane,” returned Thrush, 
mixing drinks in the corner, “I should refer you 
3°4 


After the Fair 

to the first chapter of the Book of Job. I provided 
the prisoner, and I’d a perfect right to take him 
away again. Blessed be the song of the Thrush!” 

“You say you provided him?” 

“In other words, I laid the information against 
my own man, but only with his own consent.” 

“Well, well, you must have your joke, I suppose. 
I can afford to put up with it now.” 

“It wasn’t meant as a joke,” returned Thrush, 
and drank deep while his client sipped. “If it 
had come off it would have been the coup of my 
career; as it didn’t—quite—one must laugh it off 
at one’s own expense. Your son has told you 
what that poor old sinner made him think he’d 
done?” 

“Of course.” 

“Would it surprise you to hear that one v,r two 
others thought the same thing?” 

“Not you, Thrush ?” 

“Not I to quite the same positive extent as my 
rascal Mullins. He jumped to it from scratch!” 

“He connected Tony with the Park murder?” 

“From the word ‘go.’ ” 

“On the strength of an asthma cigarette and 
my poor wife’s dream?” 

“No; he didn’t know about the dream. But 
he refused to believe in two independent mysteries 

3°5 


The Camera Fiend 


at one time and on one spot. The eternal unities 
was too many measles for Mullins, though he 
never heard tell of ’em in his life.” 

Mr. Upton was no longer irritated by the other’s 
flippancy. He looked at Thrush with a shining face. 

“And you never told me what was in your 
minds!” 

“It was poison even in mine; it would have 
been deadly poison to you, in the state you were 
in. I say! I’ll wear batting-gloves the next time 
we shake hands!” and Thrush blew softly on his 
mangled fingers. 

“You believed he’d done it, and you kept it to 
yourself,” murmured Mr. Upton, still much im¬ 
pressed. “Tell me, my dear fellow—did you 
believe it after that interview with Baumgartner 
in his house ? ” 

Thrush emptied his glass at once. 

“Don’t remind me of that interview, Mr. Upton; 
there was the lad on the other side of so much 
lath-and-plaster, and I couldn’t scent him through 
it! But he never made a sound, confound him!” 

“Tony’s told me about that; they were whis¬ 
pering, for reasons of their own.” 

“I ought to have seen that old man listening! 
His ears must have grown before my purblind 
eyes! But his story was an extraordinarily inter- 
306 


After the Fair 


esting and circumstantial effort. And to come 
back to your question, it did fit in with the theory 
of a fatal accident on your boy’s part; he was 
frightened to show his face at school after sleep¬ 
ing in the Park, let alone what he was supposed 
to have done there; and that, he believed, would 
break his mother’s heart in any case.” 

“By Jove, and so it might! It wouldn’t take 
much just now,” said Mr. Upton sadly. 

“So he thought of the ship you wouldn’t let 
him go out in—and the whole thing fitted in! Of 
course he had told the old ruffian—saving his 
presence elsewhere—all about the forbidden voy¬ 
age; and that gentleman of genius had it ready 
for immediate use. I’m bound to say he used it 
on me with excellent effect.” 

“Same here,” said the ironmaster—“though I’d 
no idea what you suspected. I thought it a con¬ 
ceivable way out of any bad scrape, for that par¬ 
ticular boy.” 

“It imposed upon us all,” said Thrush, “but 
one. I was prepared to believe it if you did, 
and you believed it because you didn’t know your 
boy as well as you do now. But Miss Upton, 
who seems to know him better than anybody else 
—do you remember how she wouldn’t hear of it 
for a moment?” 


307 


The Camera Fiend 


“I do so, God bless her!” 

“That shook me, or rather it prevented me 
from accepting what I never had quite accepted 
in my heart. That’s another story, and you’re 
only in the mood for one at present; but after 
seeing Baumgartner on Saturday, I thought I’d 
like to know a little more about him, not from 
outsiders, but from the inside of his own skull. 
So I went to the British Museum to have a look 
at his books. It was after hours for getting books, 
but I made such representations that they cut their 
red tape for once; and I soon read enough to 
wonder whether my grave and reverend seignior 
was quite all there. Spiritualism one knows, but 
here was spiritualism with a difference; psychic 
photography one had heard about, but here was a 
psychical photographer gone mad or bad! When 
a gifted creature puts into admirable English his 
longing to snap-shoot the souls of murderers com¬ 
ing up through the drop, like the clown at Drury 
Lane, you begin to want him elected to a fau- 
teuil in Broadmoor. Will you believe me when I 
tell you that I stumbled mentally on the very 
thing I shall presently prove to have been the 
truth, and that I dismissed it from my mind as 
the wildest impossibility?” 

“I don’t see how you’re going to prove it now,” 

3°8 


After the Fair 

remarked Mr. Upton, who hoped there would 
be no such proof, for the sake of the girl who had 
been good to his boy; but that was a private 
consideration which there was no necessity to 
express. 

“I shall want another chat with your lad when 
he’s had his sleep out,” replied Thrush signifi¬ 
cantly; “he’s told me quite enough to make me 
eager for more. But you haven’t told me any¬ 
thing about your own adventures?” 

And he got another drink to help him listen; 
for as a rule the ironmaster was only succinct when 
thoroughly irate. But now for once he was both 
brief and amiable. 

“What have I to tell compared with you ?” he 
asked. “Those damned old wooden walls only 
cleared the Thames on Sunday morning, and they 
weren’t near Plymouth when I left last night; 
but my little aluminium lot broke all her records 
before I broke one of her wheels. What I want 
to know is what you did from the time I left on 
Sunday night to that great moment this morning.” 

“I sat down to watch Baumgartner, his house,” 
replied Thrush. “The merit of those quiet little 
streets is that there are always apartments of sorts, 
though not always the most admirable sort, to be 
had in half the houses. There was quite a choice 
309 


The Camera Fiend 


bang opposite Baumgartner’s, and I’d taken a 
front room before you were through Hammer¬ 
smith. Of course I explained that I had lost a 
last train, and the landlady’s son embarrassed me 
with pajamas of inadequate dimensions. Well, I 
sat at the front window all night, for no better 
reasons than my strong feeling about the doctor’s 
writing, and your daughter’s disbelief in his yarn 
about her brother. Soon after five in the morning 
the old bird came out, and I was after him like 
knife. I tracked him to Knightsbridge without 
much difficulty, excepting the one of avoiding being 
spotted, but there that happened by the merest 
accident. He was passing under the scaffolding 
outside the church they’re pulling down there, 
and he’s so tall he knocked his hat off. I admit 
I was too close. He saw, and must have recog- 
inzed me; but I shouldn’t have recognized him 
if I hadn’t seen him start out. He was wearing 
a false beard and spectacles!” 

“That’s proof positive,” said ingenuous Mr. 
Upton under his breath. 

“Well, I confess it’s something like it in this 
case; but it was a very awkward moment for me. 
I hadn’t to let him see I knew him, nor yet that I 
was following him, and the only way was to aban¬ 
don the chase as openly as possible. It was then 
310 


After the Fair 


I decided that it was no use leaving poor old 
Mullins in pawn to the police. I redeemed him 
without delay. We went back to my new rooms 
together, which I needn’t tell you I liked so much 
that I brought a suit-case and took them fora week. 
Of course, as we had lost the run of Baumgartner, 
the next best thing was to watch for his return. 
Mullins took that on while I got some sleep; when 
I awoke the Park Lane murder was the latest, 
and I won’t say I didn’t suspect who’d done it. 
Perhaps I didn’t tell you he had his camera with 
him as well as beard and goggles, and all three 
figured in the first reports.” 

“ But all this time you had no idea my boy was 
in the house ? ” 

“None whatever; we saw the girl once or twice, 
but that was all until I wired last night. What 
I never saw myself was Baumgartner’s return; but 
in the afternoon I sent Mullins round to another 
road to try and get a room overlooking the place 
from the back. Well, the houses were too much 
class for that; but one was empty, and he got the 
key and risked going back to prison for the cause! 
Suffice it that he set eyes on both man and boy 
before I sent that wire.” 

“And you left my son in that murderer’s clutches 
a minute longer than you could help?” It was 
3 11 


The Camera Fiend 


a previous incarnation of Pocket’s father that 
broke in with this. 

“You must remember in the first place that I 
couldn’t be in the least sure it was your son; in 
the second if murder had been intended, murder 
would have been done with as little delay in his 
case as in the others; thirdly, that we’ve nothing 
to show that Dr. Baumgartner is an actual mur¬ 
derer at all, but, fourthly, that to raid his place 
was the way to make him one. Poor Mullins, too, 
as the original Sherlock of the show, was desper¬ 
ately against calling in the police under any cir¬ 
cumstances. He assured me there was no sign of 
bad blood about the house, until the small hours, 
and then he saw your son make his escape. I 
told him he should have collared the lad, but he 
lost sight of him in the night and preferred to 
keep an eye on that poor desperate doctor.” 

Thrush treated this part of his narrative with 
the peculiar confidence which most counsel re¬ 
serve for the less satisfactory aspects of their case. 
But Mr. Upton was not in a mood to press a point 
of grievance against anybody. And the name of 
Mullins reminded him that his curiosity on a very 
different point had not been gratified. 

“Why on earth did you have Mullins run in ?” 
he inquired, with characteristic absence of finesse^ 
3!2 


After the Fair 

“ I’m not very proud of it/’ replied Thrush. “ It 
didn’t come off, you see.” 

“But whatever could the object have been?” 

“I must have a damn-it if I’m to tell you that,” 
said Thrush; and the ironmaster concluded that 
he meant a final drink, from the action which he 
suited to the oath. “It was one way that oc- 
cured to me of putting salt on the lad.” 

“Tony?” 

“Yes.” 

“You puzzle me more and more.” 

“Well, you see, I gathered that he was a par¬ 
ticularly honorable boy, of fine sensibilities, and 
yet Mullins thought he had shot this man by ac¬ 
cident and was lying low. I only thought that, 
if that were so, the news of an innocent man’s 
arrest would bring him into the open as quick as 
anything. Mullins proving amenable to terms, 
and having really been within a hundred miles of 
both murders at the time they were committed, 
the rest was elementary. But what’s the good of 
talking about it ? It didn’t come off.” 

“It very nearly did! I can tell you that straight 
from Tony; he was going to give himself up 
yesterday morning, if he hadn’t accidentally satis¬ 
fied himself of his own innocence.” 

Mr. Upton said more than this, but it was the 

3*3 


The Camera Fiend 


explicit statement of fact that alone afforded 
Thrush real consolation. His spectacled eyes 
blinked keenly behind their flashing lenses; the 
button of a nose underneath twitched as though 
it scented battle once again; and the drink with 
the opprobrious name was suddenly put down 
unfinished. 

“If only I could find that camera!” he cried. 
“It’s the touchstone of the whole thing, mark my 
words. If it’s an accomplice who did this thing, 
he’s got it; even if not-” 

He stood silenced by a sudden thought, a gleam 
of light that illumed his whole flushed face. 

“Mullins!” he roared. Mullins was on the spot 
with somewhat suspicious alacrity. “Get the al¬ 
manac, Mullins, and look up Time of High Water 
at London Bridge today!” 

He himself flopped down behind the telephone 
to ring up the cab-office in Bolton Street. But it 
takes time even for a Eugene Thrush to consume 
all but three large whiskies and sodas; and the 
afternoon was already far advanced. 


3H 


CHAPTER XXII 


The Secret of the Camera 

T HE camera had been placed upon a folded 
newspaper, for the better preservation of 
the hotel table-cloth. Its apertures were still 
choked with mud; beads of slime kept breaking 
out along the joints. And Phillida was still ex¬ 
plaining to Pocket how the thing had come into 
her possession. 

“The rain was the greatest piece of luck, though 
another big slice was an iron gangway to the fore¬ 
shore about a hundred yards upstream. It was 
coming down so hard at the time that I couldn’t 
see another creature out in it except myself. I 
don’t believe a single soul saw me run down that 
gangway and up again; but I dropped my purse 
over first for an excuse if anybody did. I popped 
the camera under my waterproof, and carried it up 
to the King’s Road before I could get a cab. But 
I never expected to find you awake and about 
again; next to the rain that’s the best luck of all!” 
“Why?” 

“ Because you know all about photography and 

3 l 5 


The Camera Fiend 

I don’t. Suppose he took a last photograph, and 
suppose that led directly to the murder!” 

“ That’s an idea.” 

“The man threw the camera into the river, but 
the plate would be in it still, and you could de¬ 
velop it!” 

The ingenious hypothesis had appealed to the 
eager credulity of the boy; but at the final propo¬ 
sition he shook a reluctant head. 

“I’m afraid there’s not much chance of there 
being anything to develop; the slide’s been open 
all this time, you see.” 

“ I know. I tried to shut it, but the wood must 
have swollen in the water. Yet the more it has 
swollen, the better it ought to keep out the light, 
oughtn’t it ?” 

“I’m afraid there isn’t a dog’s chance,” he 
murmured, as he handled the camera again. Yet 
it was not of the folding-bellows variety, but was 
one of the earlier and stronger models in box form, 
and it had come through its ordeal wonderfully 
on the whole. Nothing was absolutely broken; 
but the swollen slide jammed obstinately, until 
in trying to shut it by main force, Pocket lost his 
grip of the slimy apparatus, and sent it flying to 
the floor, all but the slide which came out bodily 
in his hand. 


3 i 6 



“I popped the camera under my waterproof.’ 


































































































The Secret of the Camera 

“That settles it,” remarked Phillida, resign¬ 
edly. The exposed plate stared them in the face, 
a sickly yellow in the broad daylight. It was 
cracked across . the middle, but almost dry and 
otherwise uninjured. 

“I am sorry!” exclaimed Pocket, as they stood 
over the blank sheet of glass and gelatine; it was 
like looking at a slate from which some infinitely 
precious message had been expunged unread. “Pm 
not sure that you weren’t right after all; what’s 
water-tight must be more or less light-tight, when 
you come to think of it. I say, what’s all this ? 
The other side oughtn’t to bulge like that!” 

He picked the broken plate out of the side that 
was already open, and weighed the slide in his 
hand; it was not heavy enough to contain another 
plate, he declared with expert conviction; yet the 
side which had not been opened was a slightly 
bulging but distinctly noticeable convexity. Pocket 
opened it at a word from Phillida, and an over¬ 
folded packet of MS. leapt out. 

“It’s his writing!” cried the girl, with pain and 
awe in her excitement. She had dropped the doc¬ 
ument at once. 

“It’s in English,” said Pocket, picking it up. 

“It must be what he was writing all last night!” 
“It is.” 


The Camera Fiend 


“You see what it is!” urged Phillida, feebly. 
But she watched him closely as he read to him¬ 
self:— 

“June 20, 190—. 

“It is a grim coincidence that I should sit down 
to reveal the secret of my latter days on what is 
supposed to be the shortest night of the year; for 
they must come to an end at sunrise, viz., at 3.44 
according to the almanac, and it is already after 
10 p. m. Even if I sit at my task till four I shall 
have less than six hours in which to do justice to 
the great ambition and the crowning folly of my 
life. I use the underlined word advisedly; some 
would substitute ‘monomania/ but I protest I am 
as sane as they are, fail as I may to demonstrate 
that fact among so many others to be dealt with 
in the very limited time at my disposal. Had I 
more time, or the pen of a readier writer, I should 
feel surer of vindicating my head if not my heart. 
But I have been ever deliberate in all things (ex¬ 
cepting, certainly, the supreme folly already men¬ 
tioned), and I would be as deliberate over the last 
words I shall ever write, as in my final prepara¬ 
tions for death-” 

“What is it?” asked Phillida, for his eyes had 
dilated as he read, and he was breathing hard. 

318 


The Secret of the Camera 

“He practically says he was going to commit 
suicide at daybreak! He’s said so once already, 
but now he says it in so many words!” 

“Well, we know he didn’t do it,” said Phillida, 
as though she found a crumb of comfort in the 
thought. 

“ I’m not so sure about that.” 

“Go on reading it aloud. I can bear it if that’s 
the worst.” 

“But it isn’t, Phillida. I can see it isn’t!” 

“Then let us read it together. I’d rather face 
it with you than afterward all by myself We’ve 
seen each other through so much, surely we can— 
surely-” 

Her words were swept away in a torrent of tears, 
and it was with dim eyes but a palpitating heart 
that Pocket looked upon the forlorn drab figure 
of the slip of a girl; for as yet, despite her pretext 
to Mr. Upton, she had taken no thought for her 
mourning, that unfailing distraction to the nor¬ 
mally bereaved, but had put on anything she could 
find of a neutral tint; and yet it was just her dear 
disdain of appearance, the intimate tears gathering 
in her great eyes, unchecked, and streaming down 
the fresh young face, the very shabbiness of her 
coat and skirt, that made her what she was in his 
sight. Outside, the rain had stopped, and Trafal- 
319 


The Camera Fiend 


gar Square was drying in the sun, that streamed in 
through the open window of the hotel sitting-room, 
and poured its warm blessing on the two young 
heads bent as one over the dreadful document. # 

This was the part they read together, now in 
silence, now one and now the other whispering a 
few sentences aloud:— 

“ What I have called my life’s ambition demands 
but little explanation here. I have never made 
any secret of it, but, on the contrary, I have given 
full and frank expression to my theories in places 
where they are still accessible to the curious. I 
refer to my signed articles on spirit photography 
in Light , Human Nature , The Occult Review and 
other periodicals, but particularly to the paper en¬ 
titled “The Flight of the Soul,” in The Nineteenth 
Century and After for January of last year. The 
latter article contains my last published word on 
the matter which has so long engrossed my mind. 
It took me some months to prepare and to write, 
and its reception did much to drive me to the ex¬ 
treme measures I have since employed. Treated 
to a modicum of serious criticism by the scien¬ 
tific press, but more generally received with igno¬ 
rant and tolerant derision, which is the English¬ 
man’s attitude toward whatsoever is without his 
320 


The Secret of the Camera 

own contracted ken, my article, the work of months, 
was dismissed and forgotten in a few days. I 
had essayed the stupendous feat of awaking the 
British nation to a new idea, and the British na¬ 
tion had responded with a characteristic snore of 
unfathomable indifference. My name has not 
appeared in its vermin press from that day to this; 
it was not mentioned in the paragraph about the 
psychic photographer which went the rounds about 
a year ago. Yet I was that photographer. I am 
the serious and accredited inquirer to whom the 
London hospitals refused admittance to their 
pauper death-beds, thronged though those notori¬ 
ously are by the raw material of the British medical 
profession. Begin at the bottom of the British 
medical ladder, and you are afforded the earliest 
and most frequent opportunities of studying (if 
not accelerating) the phenomena of human dis¬ 
solution; but against the foreign scientist the door 
is closed without reference either to the quality 
of his credentials or the purity of his aims. I can 
conceive no purer and no loftier aim than mine. 
It is as high above that of your ordinary physician 
as heaven itself is high above this earth. Your 
physician wrestles with death to lengthen life, 
whereas I would sacrifice a million lives to prove 
that there is no such thing as death; that this 


The Camera Fiend 


human life of ours, by which we set such childish 
store, is but a fleeting phase of the permanent life 
of the spirit. One shrinks from setting down so 
trite a truism; it is the common ground of all 
religions, but I have reached it from the opposite 
pole. Religion is to me the unworthy triumph of 
instinct over knowledge, a lazy substitution of 
invention for discovery. Religion invites us to 
take her postulates on trust; but a material age is 
deserving of material proofs, and it is these proofs 
I have striven to supply. Surely it is a higher aim, 
and not a lower, to appeal to the senses that cannot 
deceive, rather than to the imagination which 
must and does ? But I am trenching after all 
upon ground which I myself have covered before 
to-day; it is my function to-night to relate a per¬ 
sonal narrative rather than to reiterate personal 
views. Suffice it that to me, for many years, the 
only path to the Invisible has been the path of so- 
called spiritualism; the only lamp that illumined 
that path, so that all who saw might follow it for 
themselves, the lamp of spirit photography. It 
is a path with a bad name, a path infested with 
quacks and charlatans, and by false guides who 
rival the religious fanatics in the impudence of their 
appeal to man’s credulity. Even those who bear 
the lamp I hold aloft are too often jugglers and 


The Secret of the Camera 

rogues, to whose wiles, unfortunately, the simple 
science of photography lends itself all too readily. 
Nothing is easier than the production of impossible 
pictures by a little manipulation of film or plate; if 
the spiritual apparition is not to be enticed within 
range of the lens, nothing easier than to fabricate 
an approximate effect. And what spiritualist has 
yet succeeded in summoning spirits at will ? It 
is the crux of the whole problem of spiritualism, 
to establish any sort or form of communication 
with disembodied spirits at the single will of the 
embodied; hence the periodical exposure of the 
paid medium, the smug scorn of the unbeliever, 
and the discouragement of genuine exploration 
beyond the environment of the flesh. There is 
one moment, and only one, at which a man may 
be sure that he stands, for however brief a particle 
of time, in the presence of a disembodied soul. It 
is the moment at which soul and body part com¬ 
pany in what men call death. The human watcher 
sees merely the collapse of the human envelope; 
but many a phenomenon invisible to the human 
eye has been detected and depicted by that of the 
camera, as everybody knows who has the slightest 
acquaintance with the branch of physics known 
as ‘fluorescence/ The invisible spirit of man 
surely falls within this category. To the crystal 
323 


The Camera Fiend 


eye of science it is not so much invisible as elusive 
and intractable. Once it has fled this earth, the 
sovereign opportunity is gone; but photography 
may often intercept the actual flight of the soul. 

“I say no more than ‘often’ because there are 
special difficulties into which I need not enter here; 
but they would disappear, or at least be minimized, 
if the practice received the encouragement it de¬ 
serves, instead of the forbidding ban of a senti¬ 
mental generation. It would hurt nobody; it 
would comfort and convince the millions who at 
present have only their Churches’ word for the 
existence of an eternal soul in their perishable 
bodies. It would prove more, in the course of a 
few experiments, than all the Churches have proved 
between them in nineteen centuries. Yet how are 
my earnest applications received, in hospitals 
where men die daily, in prisons where they are 
still occasionally put to death ? I am refused, 
rebuffed, gratuitously reprimanded; in fact, I am 
driven ultimately to the extreme course of taking 
human life, on my own account, in order to prove 
the life eternal. Call it murder, call it what you 
will; in a civilization which will not hear of a lethal 
chamber for congenital imbeciles it would be waste 
of time to urge the inutility of a life as an excuse 
for taking it, or the misery of an individual 
324 


as a 


The Secret of the Camera 

reason for sending him to a world which cannot 
use him worse than this world. I can only say 
that I have not deprived the State of one conceiv¬ 
ably profitable servant, or cut short a single life 
of promise or repute. I have picked my few 
victims with infinite care from amid the moral or 
material wreckage of life; either they had nothing 
to live for, or they had no right to live. Charlton, 
the licensed messenger, had less to live for than 
any man I ever knew; in the course of our brief 
acquaintance he frequently told me how he wished 
he was dead. I came across him in Kensington, 
outside a house to which an unseemly fracas had 
attracted my attention as I passed. Charlton had 
just been ejected for being drunk and insolent, 
and refusing to leave without an extra sixpence. 
I befriended him. He was indeed saturated with 
alcohol and honeycombed with disease; repulsive 
in appearance, and cantankerous in character, his 
earnings were so slender that he was pitifully clad, 
and without a night’s lodging oftener than not. 
He had not a friend in the world, and was suffering 
from an incurable malady of which the end was 
certain agony. I resolved to put him out of his 
misery, and at the same time to try to photograph 
the escape of his soul. A favorable opportunity 
did not present itself for some time, during which 
325 


The Camera Fiend 


Charlton subsisted largely on my bounty; at last 
one morning I found him asleep on a bench in 
Holland Walk, and not another being in sight, 
and I shot him with a cheap pistol which I had 
purchased second-hand for the purpose, and which 
I left beside him on the seat. Yet the weapon it 
was ‘that cast a doubt upon the authenticity of the 
suicide, despite my final precaution of stuffing a 
number of cartridges into the dead man’s pocket; 
pot-house associates came forward to declare that 
he could never have possessed either the revolver 
or its price without their knowledge. Hence the 
coroner’s repudiation of the verdict at the inquest. 
Yet it is to be feared that the fate of such as poor 
Charlton excites but little public interest in its 
explanation, and that the police themselves never 
took more than an academic interest in the case. 

“To me it was a bitter disappointment on other 
grounds. I had lost very few seconds between 
pulling the revolver trigger and pressing the bulb 
of my pneumatic shutter; but one had to get back 
into position for this, and the fact remains that 
I was too late. The result may be found among 
my negatives. It is dreadfully good of the dead 
man, if not a unique photograph of actual death; 
but it lacks the least trace of the super-normal. 
The flight of the soul had been too quick for me; 

326 


The Secret of the Camera 

it would be too quick again unless I hit upon some 
new method. I had not only failed to leave con¬ 
vincing evidence of suicide, but the fatal pause 
between pistol shot and snap shot was due entirely 
to my elaborate attempt in that direction. It was 
not worth making again. The next case should be 
a more honest breach of the Sixth Commandment; 
the shot to be fired, and the photograph taken, 
at the same range and all but at the same instant. 
There would be no further point in leaving the 
weapon behind, so I was free to choose the one 
best suited to my purpose, and to adapt it at my 
leisure to my peculiar needs. Eventually I evolved 
the ingenious engine which, no doubt, has already 
explained itself better than I could possibly explain 
it; if not, the discoverer of the camera need not 
hesitate to experiment with the pistol, as it will 
not be loaded when found.” 

There was a brief discussion here. The children 
could not understand about the pistol; but only 
one of them cared what had become of it. For 
Phillida it was enough to know that the writer 
of this shameless rigmarole, with its pompous 
periods and its callous gusto, must long ago have 
lost his reason. She had no doubt whatever about 
that, and already it had brought a new light into 

327 


The Camera Fiend 


her eyes. She would pause to discuss nothing else. 
It was her finger that pointed the way through 
the next passages. 

“The perfection or completion of my device was 
the secret work of many weeks; it brings me down 
almost to the other day, and to what I have de¬ 
scribed as the supreme folly of my life. I had 
everything in readiness for another attempt to 
liberate and photograph a human soul in con¬ 
secutive fractions of a second. But the right man 
was never in the right place at the right time; 
one saw him by the dozen in a crowd, but the 
people one met all by themselves, in the early 
summer mornings, stayed one’s hand repeatedly 
by the eager brightness of their eyes or a happy 
elasticity of step. Once an out-patient at the 
Brompton Hospital, whom I had dogged ail the 
way down to Richmond Park, was cheated of a 
merciful end by dusk falling just as I had him to 
myself. No; the dawn and the drunkard were 
still my best chance. So it was that the wretch 
whose name I forget met with his death in Hyde 
Park last Tuesday morning. I knew him by sight 
as a pot-house loafer of the Charlton circle, but 
it was quite by chance that I followed his uncertain 
footsteps through the Park, and saw him go deliber- 
328 


The Secret of the Camera 

ately to bed in the drenching dew. His face filled 
in his tale; it was another farrago of privation and 
excess. This was the type that caused me no com¬ 
punction: having aimed and focussed at the same 
time, as my invention provides, I despatched the 
poor devil as he lay on his side, with his hat over 
his eyes, and exposed my plate as he rolled over on 
his face. It may be reckoned an offensive detail, 
but the click of my instantaneous shutter coincided 
with the last clutter in his throat. 

“ I need hardly say that I had looked about me 
pretty thoroughly before firing, and my first act 
after taking the photograph was to make another 
wary survey of the scene. It had the advantage 
that one could see a considerable distance in three 
directions, and in none of these, neither right nor 
left along the path, nor yet straight ahead across 
the grass on the edge of which my victim lay, was 
a living creature to be seen. This was very reas¬ 
suring as I felt that I could see a good deal far¬ 
ther than the report of my small automatic pistol 
was likely to be heard; for it is a remarkable feature 
of most shooting cases, especially where a pistol 
has been used, and in the open air, how seldom 
it is that a witness can be found who has actually 
heard the fatal shot. In the fourth quarter, where 
there was a bank of shrubbery behind some iron 

329 


The Camera Fiend 


palings, I looked last, for I was standing with 
my back that way. How shall I describe my sen¬ 
sations on turning round ? There was a young 
lad within a few feet of me, on the other side of the 
palings; and this young lad was flourishing a 
revolver in his right hand! 

“At first I made certain he had seen everything; 
but his blank and frank bewilderment was more re¬ 
assuring at a second glance, and at a third I guessed 
what had happened to him. His crumpled clothes 
were dank with dew. His eyes were puddles of 
utter stupefaction. He had been sleeping in the 
Park, and walking in his sleep, and in all proba¬ 
bility it was my shot which had brought him to 
himself; of this, however, I was less sure, and in 
my doubt I was disastrously inspired to accuse 
him of having fired the shot himself. It never 
struck me that he could mistake the body behind 
me for a living man; it was with a wild idea of 
being the first to accuse the other, that I asked him 
if he knew what he had done, and seized his 
revolver at the same moment. I had the wit to 
grasp it in my hot hand until the barrel was just 
warm enough to help me convince the child that 
he really had fired the shot; but, since he could not 
see it for himself, I was not going out of my way 
just then to tell him it was a fatal shot. Already 
330 


The Secret of the Camera 

I regretted that I had gone so far, and yet already 
I saw myself committed to a course of action as 
rash as it was now inevitable. The boy became 
convulsed with asthma; I could not leave him 
there, to tell his story when the body was dis¬ 
covered, to have it disproved perhaps on the spot, 
at the latest on a comparison of bullets, and the 
truth brought home to me through his description. 
Again, when I had taken him to my house, with 
all sorts of foolish precautions, and still more 
foolish risks, I had to keep him there. How could 
I let him loose to blurt out his story and implicate 
me more readily than ever after what he had seen 
of me at home ? I had to keep him there—I repeat 
it—alive or dead. And I was not the kind of 
murderer (if I am one at all) to take a young and 
innocent life, if I could help it, to preserve my 
own; on the contrary, I had, and I hope I always 
should have had, humanity enough at least to do 
what I could for a fellow-creature battling with an 
attack which almost threatened to remove him 
from my path without my aid.” 

There followed a few remarks on Pocket’s 
character as the writer read it. They were not 
uncomplimentary to Pocket personally, but they 
betrayed a profound disdain for the typically 
331 


The Camera Fiend 


British institution of which Pocket was too readily 
accepted as a representative product. His general 
ignorance and credulity received a grim tribute; 
they were the very qualities the doctor would have 
demanded in a chosen dupe. Yet he appeared to 
have enjoyed the youth’s society, his transparent 
honesty, his capacity for enthusiastic interest, 
whether in the delights of photography or in the 
horrors of war. Baumgartner seemed aware that 
he had been somewdiat confidential on both sub¬ 
jects, and that either his contempt of human life, 
or his ambitions in the matter of psychic photog¬ 
raphy, would have been better kept to himself; but, 
on the other hand, he “ greatly doubted whether 
they taught boys to put two and two together, at 
these so-called public schools”; and, after all, it 
was not detection by the boy, but through the 
boy, that he had to fear. 

The madness of keeping him prisoner, as he 
had been from the beginning, in spite of all pre¬ 
tences and persuasions to the contrary, was another 
thing to which Baumgartner had been thoroughly 
alive all along. He had regarded it from the first 
as “the certain beginning of the end”; from the 
first, he had been prepared with specious expla¬ 
nations for any such inquisitor as the one who had 
actually arrived no later than Saturday afternoon. 

332 


The Secret of the Camera 

He wrote without elation of his interview with 
Thrush, whose name he knew; the doctor had 
not been deceived as to the transitory character 
of his own deception. It was the same with the 
letter which he had pretended to post, which could 
only have kept the boy quiet for a day or two, if 
he had posted it, but which the boy himself had 
discovered never to have been posted at all. There 
was a sufficiently cool description of the desperate 
mood into which Baumgartner’s intuition of the 
boy’s discovery had thrown him on the Sunday 
night. 

“It was then,” he wrote, “that I formed a proj¬ 
ect which I should have been sorry indeed to carry 
out, though I should certainly have done so if he 
had given me the chance I sought. It must be 
understood that my second attempt to photograph 
the flight of the soul had proved as great a fiasco 
as the first. Suddenly I hit upon a perfectly con¬ 
ceivable (even though it seem a wilfully grotesque) 
explanation of my failure. What if the human 
derelicts I had so far chosen for my experiments 
had no souls to photograph ? Sodden with drink, 
debauched, degraded, and spiritually blurred or 
blunted to the last degree, these after all were 
the least likely subjects to yield results to the spirit 
333 


The Camera Fiend 

photographer. I should have chosen saints instead 
of sinners such as these, entities in which the soul 
was a major and not a minor factor. I thought 
of the saintliest men I knew in London, of some 
Jesuit Fathers of my acquaintance, of a ‘light’ 
specialist I know of who is destroying himself by 
inches in the cause of science, of certain missioners 
in the slums; but I did not think twice of any one 
of them; their lives are much too valuable for me 
to cut them short on the mere chance of a com¬ 
pensating benefit to mankind at large. Last, and 
longest, I thought of the boy upstairs. I had not 
meant to sacrifice him; a young life, of some 
promise, is only less sacred to me than a mature 
life rich in beneficent activities. But this young 
fellow was going to be my ruin. I could see it in 
his eyes. He had found me out about the letter; 
he would be the means of my being found out 
and stopped forever in the work of my life. It 
was his life or mine; it should be his; but I was 
not going to take it there in the house, for reasons 
I need not enter into here, and I intended to take 
more than his life while I was about it. But he 
never gave me the chance. I did my best to get 
him to go out with me this morning. But he 
refused, as a horse refuses a jump, or a dog the 
water. He said he was ill; he looked ill. But 
334 


The Secret of the Camera 

I have no doubt he was well enough to make his 
escape soon after my back was turned. I see 
he has broken into my dark-room for the clothes 
I took away from him before I went out; he would 
scarcely remain after that; but, to tell the truth, 
I have hardly given him a thought since my 
return. ,, 

The readers shuddered over this long paragraph. 
More than once the boy broke in with his own 
impulsive version of the awful moments on the 
Sunday night and the Monday morning, in his 
bedroom at the top of the doctor’s house. He 
declared that nothing short of main force would 
have dragged him out-of-doors that morning, that 
he felt it in his bones that he would never come 
back alive. Then he would be sorry he had said 
so much. It only increased his companion’s 
anguish. She was reading every word religiously, 
with a most painful fascination; it was as though 
every word drew blood. There was a brief but 
terrible account of the murder of Sir Joseph 
Schelmerdine outside his own house in Park Lane. 
It was the rashest of all the crimes; but, apparently, 
the one occasion on which the doctor had disguised 
himself beforehand; and that only because Sir 
Joseph and he knew and disliked each other so 

335 


The Camera Fiend 


intensely that a “ straight” interview was out of 
the question. As it was he had escaped by a 
miracle, after lying all day in a straw-loft, creeping 
into a carriage at nightfall, and getting out on the 
wrong side when it drove round to its house. 
Baumgartner described the incident with a callous 
relish, as perhaps the most exciting in his long 
career; he was going on to explain his subsequent 
return, in propria persona , and yet by stealth, 
when he paused in the middle of a sentence which 
was never finished. And his statement concluded 
as follows, in less careful language and a more 
flowing hand:— 

“I thought the fool had cleared out long ago. 
The day’s excitement must have driven him clean 
out of my head. I never thought of him when 
I got back, never till I saw the damage to the 
dark-room window and missed his clothes. I 
didn’t waste two thoughts upon him then. I had 
my negative to develop. A magnificent negative 
it was, too, yet another absolute failure from the 
practical point of view, perhaps from the same 
reason as its predecessors. South African mines 
may produce gold and diamonds (licit and illicit!) 
but their yield in souls is probably the poorest 
to the square mile anywhere on earth. Schel- 
336 


The Secret of the Camera 

merdine never had one in his gross carcass. So 
there was an end of him, and a good riddance to 
rotten clay. I have not thought of him again all 
night. I have thought of nothing but this perhaps 
passionately dispassionate statement that I have 
made up my mind to leave behind me. It has 
given me strange pleasure to write, a satisfaction 
which I have no longer the time to attempt to 
analyze; all night long my pen has scarcely paused, 
and I not conscious of a moment’s weariness of 
mind, body, or hand. Only sometimes have I 
paused to light my pipe. I had made such a pause, 
perhaps half an hour ago, when in the terrible 
stillness of the night I heard a footstep in the hall. 
My nerves were somewhat on edge with all this 
writing; it might be my imagination. I stole to 
my door, and as I opened it the one below shut 
softly. I waited some time, heard nothing more, 
went down with my lamp, and threw open the 
drawing-room door. There was my young fellow, 
not gone at all, but sitting in the dark with one 
whose name there is no need to mention. I do not 
wish to be misunderstood. It was all innocent 
enough, even I never doubted that. But some¬ 
how the sight of that boy and girl, sitting there in 
the dark without a word, afraid to go to bed— 
afraid of me—made the blood boil over in my veins. 

337 


The Camera Fiend 


I could have trampled on that lad, my Jonah 
whom I had pictured overboard at last, and I did 
hurl the lamp at his head. I am glad it missed 
him. I am glad he made good his escape while 
I was seeing his companion safe upstairs. If I 
had found him where I left him, God knows what 
violence I might not have done him after all. The 
boy has good in him, and more courage than he 
knows himself; again I say that I am glad he has 
escaped unscathed. His life was not safe, but 
now I shall only take my own. 

“Yes! I have made up my mind; it is better 
than leaving it to the common hangman of this 
besotted country. I know what to expect in en¬ 
lightened England: either a death unfit for a dog, 
or existence worse than death in a criminal lunatic 
asylum. I prefer my own peculiar quietus; it has 
stood on my table all night long, ready and pointed 
at my heart; a hand upon the door, a step behind 
me, and I should have rolled over dead at their 
feet. So it will be if even now they are waiting for 
me outside; but, if not, I know where to go, where 
already it is broad daylight, where the wide open 
space will quicken and enhance every ray, and the 
broad river multiply the sun by a million facets 
of living fire. It is not the light that will fail me, 
there; and as I have served others, so also will I 

338 


The Secret of the Camera 

serve myself, and it may be with better fortune 
than they have brought me. Who knows ? It 
would be in keeping with the poetic ironies of this 
existence. At all events, unless waylaid at once, 
I am giving it a chance. I shall place the camera 
on the parapet of the Embankment. I have fitted 
the shutter with a specially long pneumatic tube, 
and the bulb will do its double work as usual when 
my fingers relax. I have long had it all in my 
mind. I have written full instructions on the enve¬ 
lope which I shall stick by the flap to the open 
slide; if we are found by a reasonably intelligent 
person, the slide will be shut, and the camera 
handed over bodily to the police. They, I think, 
may be trusted to honor one’s last instructions, if 
only out of curiosity; their eyes will be the first to 
read what I fear they will describe as my ‘full 
confession/ Well, it is ‘full/ and the substantive 
must be left to them. So long as the document does 
not fall into one little pair of gentle hands, I shall 
lie easy in whatever ignominious grave they lay 
me. That is why I hide it where I do: since, if 
it fell first into those hands, it would never see the 
light at all.” 

There was a little more, but Phillida suddenly 
snatched the MS. away, and wept over the end, 
339 


The Camera Fiend 


bitterly, and yet not altogether in bitterness, while 
Pocket picked up the camera and set it back in 
its place on the muddy newspaper. Phillida 
folded up the packet, and after a moment’s hesita¬ 
tion went away with it, jingling keys in her other 
hand. On her return she stood petrified on the 
threshold. 

Pocket was seated at the table, the red bulb of 
the pneumatic shutter between his finger and 
thumb; he pressed the bulb, and there was a loud 
metallic snap inside the camera; he released the 
pressure, and the shutter snapped like a shutter 
and nothing else. Phillida came forward with 
a cry. Pocket had taken the top off the camera; 
it was like a box without the lid, and on the one 
side there was nothing between the lens and the 
grooved carrier for the slide, but on the other 
there was an automatic pistol, fixed down with 
wires, as a wild beast might be lashed, and its 
muzzle pointing through the orifice intended for 
the second lens of the stereoscopic camera. 

Pocket pressed again, and again the mild clash 
of the shutter was preceded by the vicious one 
that would have been an explosion if there had 
been another cartridge in the pistol. 

“And we never guessed it!” said he. “That’s 
why he went in for this sort of double camera, 
340 


The Secret of the Camera 

and rigged it up to take both kinds of shot in 
quick succession. It’s the cleverest thing I ever 
heard of in my life.” 

He spoke as if it were only clever! Phillida 
stared at it and him without a word. 

“The cleverest part is the way you aim. I do 
believe he relied altogether on that spot about 
the middle of the focussing screen. Pve been 
trying it against the window, and where that spot 
comes the pistol’s pointing every time. It’s a 
fixed focus, about ten to fifteen feet, I fancy, and 
the spot isn’t quite in the middle of the screen, 
but just enough to the left to allow. I don’t 
quite see how the one bulb works everything, but 
these springs and things are a bit confusing. We 
shan’t understand everything till we take it to 
pieces.” 

“You mean the police won’t!” said Phillida, 
bitterly. 

“The police! I never thought of them.” 

“What do you mean to do with this—this in¬ 
fernal machine?” the girl asked, her voice break¬ 
ing over the perfectly applicable term. 

“What do you mean to do with—the writing?” 
demanded Pocket in his turn. 

“Burn it! I’ve asked for a fire in my room; 
it’s locked away meanwhile.” 

34i 


The Camera Fiend 


“Well, this is yours, too,” said Pocket, deliber¬ 
ately, “to do what you like with as well.” 

“They wouldn’t think so!” 

“They’ll never know.” 

Phillida shook her head, and not without some 
scorn. “You couldn’t keep it to yourself,” she 
said. “You would have to tell.” 

“Well, but not everybody,” said poor Pocket. 
“Only my father, if you like!” he added, valiantly. 

“Mr. Upton would feel bound to tell.” 

“I don’t see that. Didn’t you hear what he 
said about a man’s secrets dying with him?” 

“He’s so kind! He says that; he said it again 
to me; but this is the mystery of the day. It’ll 
be the talk for months, if not years. And as yet 
only you and I, in all the world, have found it 
out!” 

She looked at him so wistfully, so sweetly and 
sadly and confidentially, that he would have been 
either more or less than human boy if he had failed 
to see her heart’s desire, and how it was still in 
his power to save her the supreme humiliation 
and distress of sharing their secret with the world. 
He made up his mind on the spot; and yet it was 
a mind that looked both ways at every turn of 
affairs, and even then he saw what he was going to 
lose. Fred and Horace would not sit nearly so 
342 


The Secret of the Camera 

spell-bound as they might have done, would prob¬ 
ably back their penetration of the mystery against 
his! There would be no boasting about it in front 
of the hall fire at school, no breathing it even to 
Smith minor out for a walk; no adventure to re¬ 
count all his days; and Pocket was one to whom 
the salt of an adventure would always be its sub¬ 
sequent recital. But he could “play the game” 
as well as Horace himself, when he happened 
to have no doubt as to the game to play. And 
now he had none whatever. 

“Phillida, if you wish it, I’ll never breathe a 
syllable of all this to a single soul on earth, I don’t 
care who they are, or what they do to me!” 

He wanted them to put him on the rack that 
moment. 

“Oh, Tony, do you mean it?” 

Her eyes had filled. 

“Of course I mean it! I’ll swear it more 
solemnly than I’ve ever sworn anything in my life 
so far.” 

“No, no! Your word’s enough. Don’t I know 
what that’s worth, after this terrible week?” 

And she cried again at its hideous memories, 
so that Pocket turned away and put the camera 
together again, and wrapped it up in her water¬ 
proof, so that he might not see her tears. 

343 


The Camera Fiend 


“I'll never breathe a single word to a single 
soul,” he vowed, “except yourself.” 

She caught at that through her tears. He could 
talk to her about it, always, as much as ever he 
liked; it would be a bond between them all their 
lives. And not until she said it, to be just to 
Pocket, did he think of a reward or look beyond 
those days. 

But what were they to do with a stereoscopic 
camera containing an automatic pistol ? It was 
not to be burnt in a grate like a sheaf of MS. 
They thought about it for some time with anxious 
faces; for it was getting on toward evening now, 
though the sun was out again, and it was lighter 
than the early afternoon; but Mr. Upton might be 
back any minute. It was Phillida who at last 
said she knew. She would not tell him what she 
meant to do; but she put on her waterproof again, 
little as it was wanted now, and the camera 
under it as before; and together they sallied forth 
into the noisy and crowded Strand. 

Pocket did not know where he was, and Phillida 
would not tell him where she was going, neither 
could he question her in that alarming throng. 
He felt a frightful sense of guilt and danger, not so 
much to himself as to her, with that lethal weapon 
concealed about her; every man who looked at 
344 


The Secret of the Camera 

them was a detective in his eyes, and past the 
policemen at the corners he wanted to run. But 
they gained the middle of Waterloo Bridge un¬ 
detected, and ensconced themselves in a recess 
without creating a sensation. 

“Now, then,” said Phillida, “will you focus 
Westminster Bridge and the Houses of Parlia¬ 
ment, or shall I ?” 

There they were before them against the sunset, 
the long lithe bridge, the stately towers. But 
Pocket could not see Phillida’s drift until she 
aimed herself, and, aiming, let the square black 
box slip clean through her fingers into the depths 
of the river from which she had only retrieved it 
a couple of hours before, as a body is committed 
to the deep. 

She bewailed her stupidity; he had the wit to 
echo her then, and in a loud voice, that any eye¬ 
witness or passer-by might be struck with the 
genuine severity of their loss. But there had been 
no eye-witness who thought it worth while to rally 
them on the occurrence, and the busy townsfolk 
hastening past were all too much engrossed in 
their own affairs to take any interest in those of 
the boy and girl who seemed themselves in some¬ 
thing of a hurry to get back to the Strand. 

And in the Strand the first thing they saw was 

345 


The Camera Fiend 

a yellow poster bearing but four words in enor¬ 
mous black letters:— 

CHELSEA INQUEST 
CAMERA CLUE! 

Phillida slipped her hand within Pocket’s arm, 
and Pocket was man enough to press it to his side, 


* 7&3 


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